


Power Plays

by Kizmet



Series: MCU Skrull Invasion [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Bitter Tony Stark, Civil War Team Iron Man, Dark fic, Facial Trauma, Hurt Tony Stark, Infinity War AU, M/M, Not Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie) Compliant, Not Team!Cap Friendly, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Salty, Suicide
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-11
Updated: 2018-06-01
Packaged: 2019-03-29 18:25:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 7
Words: 34,862
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13932717
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kizmet/pseuds/Kizmet
Summary: With Thanos on the horizon the world asks the rogue Avengers back.  But there are still hard feelings and secrets looming over the team... And HYDRA wasn't the only infiltration going on, just the only one discovered.





	1. Power Plays

**Author's Note:**

> Well, normally I assume that most all characters not actually on Team!Cap would act more like reasonable adults, but there are a few touches of bitterness aimed at certain (Wanda/Vision) scene from the IW trailer and that it looks like "Ant-Man and Wasp" is going to be treating the Accords like some sort of a horrific thing... even though Scott apparently got house arrest for illegally entering another country and smashing up their airport (without even saving the world from anything as a result).
> 
> Also running with the notion that there are very few members of Team!Cap that would be better served as characters if they were actually villains

“Tony we need to talk.” Tony rolled his eyes at Steve Roger’s painfully sincere and serious tone. Even without looking up from his workbench he already knew that the man was wearing his patented ‘Captain America is disappointed in you’ face. Like he had every right to be there, like he hadn’t had one of Tony’s supposed teammates break through several levels of security to breech Tony’s private space.

“No we don’t,” Tony said. “Big scary alien on the way to Earth, which means you’ve got the UN over a barrel. Surprisingly; or maybe not given Romanoff's response to Congress after your shit-show with SHIELD; you’re willing to use it. You demanded that the Sokovia Accords be tossed in the trash as your price to come back and fight for the Earth and they blinked first. I’m not willing to stand by and watch while the Chin from the Black Lagoon tries to have his way with the Earth so here I am: Supplying the Avengers, more specifically YOUR Avengers with gear, room, board. Just like old times… Only not.”

“Tony,” Steve said disapprovingly. “Isn’t that a little hypocritical of you. Given...”

“No,” Tony stated. “I told the Senate that they couldn’t have MY property. I showed them, the public, that Stern and, ugh, _Hammer_ were using lies and scare tactics to convince the government that they needed MY property to keep the country safe. I told them that they _didn’t_ need it, so they could be fucking _grateful_ for my help or they could fuck off. Romanoff told Congress that they couldn’t punish the lot of you for dismantling their existing protections because they _needed_ you to replace that protection. What she, and you, did was tell them that because they _did_ need you they had to accede to your demands, or else. _They_ told me that they needed me, Iron Man, I showed that they did not, aka that their Eminent Domain argument was bullshit.”

“Semantics,” Steve said dismissively. “Vanko’s existence proved that they did need you.”

“I’m the one who agreed that I was bound by the laws decided on by the majority of the planet. You’re the one who demanded, unilaterally, that the laws be changed to suit you. I’d say it’s a hell of a lot more than semantics. But I take it you’re not here to argue philosophy and neither am I. The current situation is: I’m willing to fight with you. I’m willing to fund you, against Thanos anyway. But I won’t be making the mistake of considering you or any of your flunkies my friends again. So we have nothing to talk about. So you can toddle on out of MY lab.

“Oh and tell the Widow or the Ant, whichever one of them disabled FRIDAY, that Pepper will be bringing a civil suit against them, and you, as soon as the war’s over. Industrial espionage, I do work for SI down here, this is the complete opposite of community space. If it’s the Ant, I’ll throw in Ms. van Dyne and Pym Technologies, bonus. Lang works for my competitor, just ask good old Hank about how seriously he’d take it if I hacked his firewalls. Even if I die during the war I fully trust Pepper to make your lives a living hell afterwards. If I were the lot of you,” Tony finally looked up to face Steve then jerked back when he found the other man much closer than he’d expected. “If I were you, I’d think about not surviving. You might think I’m a vengeful bastard but Pepper’s methodical and, as much respect as I’ve lost for you, I don’t think you’re quite so low as to target a civilian so there’s nothing you can do to her.”

“Tony this is exactly the sort of nonsense we have to move past,” Steve said seriously. “You need to stop stirring up old resentments, it’s bad for morale. We’re going to need every edge we can get to win against Thanos.”

“If I needed to like people to work with them, I wouldn’t have survived middle school- Someone thought making Justin Hammer my lab partner was a _good_ idea -I don’t need to like you. As hard as this might be to believe, I do understand the concept of chain of command, probably much better than you. The only chain of command you respect is the one where you’re on top. I will follow your orders in the field. That does not mean I will turn off my brain. Between my sensors, FRIDAY and simply being in the air I see more of the battlefield than you do. In case your memory is going, we have worked together before, you know how I operate in combat situations, that won’t change.”

“We’re going to have this talk whether or not you want to,” Steve stated.

“Now that doesn’t sound like a very promising start to an apology,” Tony said. “But then, I wasn’t expecting much given that piece of shit letter you sent.”

“It’s not,” Steve said as he lunged forward and grabbed Tony’s wrists. He spun them around and slammed the repulsor watch, slammed Tony, against the wall with enough force to shatter the device before Tony could consider bringing it into play.

“Arrgh!!!” Tony cried. He didn’t think Steve had broken his wrists but he knew he’d be bruised to the bone where the super soldier had grabbed him. “Have you lost your mind?” he exclaimed.

Steve smiled coldly, “Natasha disabled FRIDAY. The others will make sure there are no inconvenient interruptions from Rhodes, Spiderman or Vision… Truth be told, Wanda’s done wonders educating Vision about how a relationship is supposed to work. In his case, I doubt they’d have to do more than explain to him that you and I are working out your place on the team. He’d understand, he’s much happier now that he understands his place in his relationship with Wanda. She’s such a good girl, understands humanity so much better than he possibly could, coming from something you created as he did.”

“You’re fucking insane,” Tony said, adrenaline coursing through his veins. Mentally he reviewed his workshop, evaluating potential weapons, the time he’d need free of Steve’s hold to make it to his suit. He didn’t look around, didn’t want his gaze to give away his plans. Tony smashed his knee into Steve’s groin.

Steve doubled over but didn’t release his hold on Tony’s wrists. He spun them around and pinned Tony against his workbench. For several moments Tony pushed futilely at the table, trying to get the space to wriggle free, Steve’s ragged breathes hot against his cheek as the bigger man waited for the pain to subside.

“Now what would your friend Happy think?” Steve tsked as he wrapped an arm around Tony’s chest like a steel band, trapping his arms against his sides. “That was hardly Queensberry Rules.”

“Get the fuck off me asshole,” Tony snarled.

Steve chuckled. With his free hand he started tugging at Tony’s shirt, pulling it up until the arc reactor was exposed. “When the UN finally came to it’s senses I was so glad to see this back where it belonged,” he said as he ran his fingers around the perimeter where flesh joined to metal. “It gave us, you, an edge against Loki in 2012. I never could understand why you’d give it up for something so petty as your health.”

Tony knew it was pointless to pit himself against the super soldier in a contest of brute strength but he couldn’t stop himself from struggling with everything he had. Steve pressed his hips hard against Tony’s, crushing him against the edge of the workbench while he continued rubbing the skin around the arc reactor. Tony couldn’t really feel his touch, there was too much scar tissue, the nerves were long dead, he only felt the pressure and the strange absence of sensation that went with it. He panted, breath coming increasingly quickly until he was dizzy from too much oxygen in his blood. His heart pounded, his hands felt tingly and numb. _It wasn’t Steve, it was Obie, he was going to rip out the reactor and leave him die._

Tony greyed out. He came back to himself feeling wrung out and vaguely detached from his body. _Only astral projection is Strange’s thing. Wouldn’t really mind having that ability right now. Just wander off and leave._ Rogers was still pinning him over his workbench and he’d secured Tony’s arms behind his back with what felt like a leather belt while he’d been out. He had a comm in the hand he wasn’t using to hold Tony down. “-more to work out than I thought. Nat, just make sure FRIDAY stays down and no one comes to Tony’s lab, maybe for the rest of the day. Maybe tell the others to be a little more tolerant, I know Tony’s been- well, an asshole since we got back but- He had a panic attack when I moved a little too quickly,” Rogers sounded guilty and remorseful and Tony wondered how he’d ever believed that the man wasn’t a good liar. “Losing the fight in Siberia messed him up more than I realized.”

_There! There was **satisfaction** in his voice when he mentioned beating me. Super-spy-girl will notice and come down here to figure out what’s wrong._

“Back with me?” Rogers asked. He tossed the deactivated communicator across the room on to Tony’s couch taking away any incipient hope of grabbing it and calling for help. For a moment he went back to tracing the scars around the arc reactor then his hand slid down Tony’s stomach to play with his belt buckle.

Barely past the first panic attack, still feel like he’d taken a left turn away from reality, Tony made a token effort to break free. Then he froze, feeling the growing hardness pressed against his ass. “Oh that’s nice,” Steve purred in Tony’s ear. “Keep wriggling like that why don’t you?”

 _You’re traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mind. Next stop, the Twilight Zone!_ “You’re not Steve Rogers,” Tony said with certainty.

“What tipped you off?” Not-Rogers asked sardonically. Out of the corner of his eye Tony saw the shape of Not-Rogers’ jaw change, becoming less cleanly defined… Less human, green with multiple clefts.

 _An alien armada. Earth exposed and helpless. A malevolent presence looming over him._ Tony wanted to believe he was hallucinating- _He wasn’t hallucinating._ There was an alien wearing Steve Rogers’ skin, who was getting turned on by his futile struggling. Who had convinced his teammates- Former teammates, Tony knew they held no loyalty or affection toward him. -to disable his automated security, turn off his cameras and keep his friends away. With the specter of Wanda’s vision driving him Tony arched backwards, tried to ram his skull into the alien’s chin. He twisted and tried to get in a position to kick.

The alien gave a little huff of laughter. “You like me better like this?” he asked as he resumed Steve Rogers’ appearance. “Childhood crush? One-sided attraction? Because he certainly didn’t care about you.” _The measuring stick against which he had always been found wanting. The specter of betrayal. Nothing he hadn’t already survived._

Tony fought until he couldn’t anymore, until the effort left him gasping for air, trembling in the creature passing itself off as Steve Rogers’ arms. “That’s it. That’s good. Don’t fight me and it’ll all be so much easier on you,” Not-Rogers crooned in his ear as he worked Tony’s jeans down.

“Just for the record,” Tony managed in a rasp. “I am NOT on board.”

“You know, I thought about killing you in Siberia,” Not-Rogers continued conversationally as he set a vial of lube on the workbench. _Considerate, if you ignore the implications that raping me was always the plan._ “It would have been simple, no need to even cover it up. Just protecting my poor tortured best friend. The world might have balked but our team would have been understanding if I’d taken your head off. Only…”

_Not my team, never mine. Romanoff’s not coming, **Captain America** could tell her to put a bullet in my brain and she wouldn’t question it. Never count on anyone._

“Only you’re useful,” Not-Rogers sighed. He ran a possessive hand over Tony’s hip. “You know, if I’d been around when the Avengers found the Mind Stone I would have made certain you had all the time you needed to properly investigate it. No hasty mistake riddled measures needed.” The lube was cold and Not-Rogers’ finger insistent he prodded between his cheeks. “Can you even imagine how would it feel? To have some listen to you for once… Cassandra? You like nicknames so much, about time someone gave you one.”

Tony bit back a shocked gasp as Not-Rogers thrust a finger deeply inside his body. He leaned his weight on Tony, rocking into him as he fingered him. “Vision without Ultron first, without sacrificing J.A.R.V.I.S., it could have happened, Cassandra, Cassie? Cas? We’re on the same side. Thanos is coming and I don’t want him to have this planet anymore than you do. It could be so good, you just have to stop fighting against me. You’ll lose anyway, at most you take me down with you and then… The vision the Witch gave you? It’ll be reality for those we leave behind: Your Pepper, your Rhodey, the kid in the Spider-suit, the kid in Tennessee, they get left behind to deal with Thanos. All because you were stubborn. Just… Don’t fight me. We’re unstoppable, together.”

Not-Rogers added a second finger. Insistent, forcing Tony’s body to give, but patient, relentless. _No choice about what’s going to happen but my choice about how much damage I take. ‘Don’t fight me, you’ll only hurt yourself.’ His message is damn crystal._

 _Sex doesn’t have to be more than sex. I’ve done the anonymous partner thing… Well, I’m not going to say more than I can count, genius right. Days in a year, nineteen to thirty-eight. Not EVERY day, not even me, let’s say eighty percent. That’s five thousand, five hundred forty-eight… Still, not every partner was a one night stand. There were repeaters and occasionally some of those I’d have to classify as fuck-buddies at the bare minimum, a few I actually liked. Still betting well over four thousand partners I didn’t know from Adam-_ It wasn’t the same. _-Sex doesn’t mean a goddamn thing. Just walk away._ It wasn’t the same.

“Maybe we were,” Tony heard himself saying. “But you’re not him.”

The next thrust and stretch was rougher. Tony gasped in pain. “He’s the one who chose to lie to you,” the alien hissed. “He’s the one who refused to hear of the Mad Titan. They all follow me, not you! You need me, my support! Without me they’ll be too busy demonizing you to fight.”

“They follow him. You led them into exile.”

“I brought them back. I kept them free from lesser beings that sought control over them.”

It hurt. Split open, used. It hurt in body and soul. _A tank of oil-scummed water. His chest ripped open. Dozens of hands on him, forcing him under. Too many to fight._ They, the ones that had followed Not-Rogers had gotten to Vision. Peter was just a kid. Rhodey’s injuries kept him out of the field but he was still covering the political side- Rhodey, Pepper, Happy -It had been one thing when he thought it was Steve Rogers he was dealing with but now all bets were off.

“They’d never believe you. They’ve never listened to you.” The alien spoke with Clint’s voice, “Captain America _raped_ you? Stark, where’d you get the hard stuff ‘cause falling off the wagon doesn’t cover this level of delusional.” Natasha, “The ego to even think Steve would be interested in you.” Wanda, “Stark, lying because you couldn’t have your way?” Wilson, “Maybe I could recommend someone, this level of delusional is beyond what I’m qualified for.” Green clawed hands digging into his hips, holding him down, “Or maybe some of them would believe you… Only it wouldn’t matter because we’ve already replaced them.”

 _The moments between tortures, the moments that gave birth to Iron Man. The appearance of surrender wasn’t necessarily surrender, sometimes it was just a necessity. A prelude before coming back stronger._ Tony’s body relaxed.

“That’s it, be good for me,” Not-Rogers cooed. He pulled his fingers free and worked his fly open. “Be good for me. It doesn’t have to be bad. We're not terrible masters. Thanos would leave this world a burnt out hull. You’ll barely notice the difference when we take over.”

Tony shut his eyes and slumped, leaning his forehead against the workbench. He bit his lip as Not-Rogers pushed into him, making a satisfied grunt as he bottomed out. _Would the real Rogers have listened to the UN? Would he have cared that we were scaring people? Would he have wanted to take responsibility, real responsibility, for the Avengers’ screw-ups? Not just mouthed empty words. Would he have trusted me when I asked him to let me handle it in Berlin? Would he have called me with the information from Barnes instead of calling in some guy who got the better of Wilson and robbed our home? If this thing can be believed he was already lying to me but would he have felt something, watching me watch my parents die?_ Tony resolutely closed his ears to the sounds of Not-Rogers taking his pleasure.

As he finished Not-Rogers pulled Tony close and swung them around to brace a hip on the workbench. Still half-hard and buried inside Tony, he wrapped a warm, broad hand around Tony’s cock. “You might even find that it’s better. He never would have appreciated you, not like I do. You’re the future and nothing scared him more.”

Tony tried to let his mind wander and his body go on autopilot.

“We’re not so bad, in comparison. Just think about it Tony, one day you go to meet with the Accords Committee and Thaddeus Ross is a reasonable man, only interested in keeping the planet safe from the likes of Thanos? Just stop fighting me Tony, I want to make it better for you but you’ve gotta be good for me.”

After Not-Rogers left Tony physically locked the lab down then made a single-minded trek to the bathroom. _‘Thank God for Pepper’s fixation on lab safety,’_ he thought as he yanked on the handle below the chemical spill shower-head and turned his face up to the harsh, lukewarm spray. He spent the next hour thoroughly scrubbing down his workbench and the surrounding area of his lab. Once the room was as sterilized as he could manage Tony rebooted FRIDAY.

“I’m sorry Boss,” FRIDAY said mournfully. “I let you down, I let the Widow hack me.”

“You didn’t LET her do a damn thing,” Tony growled fiercely. “It’s not your fault. Don’t worry I’ll fix it so they can’t take advantage of you like that again.”

It was almost dawn when Tony finally left his lab. He was confident that no one on the team could take FRIDAY down again. He had his spare watch gauntlet on and he wouldn’t get caught off guard believing in the basic human decency of the returned Avengers again.

Clint was lounging in the common area watching cartoons when Tony passed through on the way back to his personal quarters. The archer’s sharp eyes tracked the slight limp in his stride and the bruises peeking out from beneath his cuffs and rolled his eyes. “Oh for the love of… Please don’t tell me I spent two years separated from my family because of you’ve been nursing a serious case of UST.”

For several moments Tony just stared at Clint, then he started laughing. The Avengers betrayed him, betrayed their families, betrayed themselves, all because Captain America couldn’t possibly be wrong. _They betrayed everything for a lie. Fuck it, I don’t need them anyway._

* * *

Thanos’ oldest Lieutenant slipped past Doctor Strange’s defenses and snatched the Eye of Agamotto, leaving the Sorcerer Supreme collapsed on the battlefield. “Stop him!” Wong shouted. “All is lost if Thanos acquires that stone!”

The combined Avengers team and all their allies scrambled to capture the wiley old man but at his command his army fell on them, covering his retreat with no concern for their own lives. Grimly Iron Man ignored the bulk of the battle, ignored his teammate’s struggles as he blasted after Ebony Maw. He only engaged with enemies who got in his way. On the ground Captain America used Ant-Man’s giant variation to open a hole in the lines so he, the Widow and Hawkeye could also pursue Maw.

A portal opened up in front of Maw to sweep him away. Cap threw his shield and caught Maw in the back of the knees. Before Maw could regain his feet and reach the portal, Cap leapt on him, trying to wrestle him to the ground. Widow positioned herself in front of the portal in case Maw managed to weasel his way free. Hawkeye tried to line up a shot as Maw and Cap rolled across the ground fighting for possession of the Time Stone. Iron Man didn’t hesitate, he fired a powerful, concentrated laser, a single shot as opposed to the flurry he’d used to bring down Vanko’s drones at the Stark Expo years earlier. The bolt cut through Maw and Captain America leaving a smoking hole, slightly larger than a fist, in both their torsos.

A second bolt through the portal destroyed the generator and collapsed it. With Maw dead and the portal closed the Thanos’ army lost cohesion and the Avengers were able to turn the tide against them. But at the site of the portal the rapidly diminishing threat of the alien army was the furthest thing from anyone’s mind. “You- You- I knew you couldn’t be trusted!” Hawkeye’s voice was thick with rage as he leveled an EMP arrow at Iron Man.

“Look-” Tony began.

“No you look. I knew you never got over being wrong about-”

“Hey Quill! Your sub-planetary allegence’s historic hero isn’t human!” Drax interrupted loudly. “Ha! I knew humans were useless!” Rocket added a beat later. The two of them drew stares from all sides. Then, slowly, eyes turned to the fallen Captain America, to the green skinned being with an alien chin in the uniform of Captain America.

“Охуе́ть!” Natasha swore softly. Clint shifted his aim from Tony to the dead alien laying on the ground.

“Remember that little private ‘talk’ you arranged for him and I?” Tony asked Natasha flatly. “I’ve known since then. He was extremely convincing about how none of you would believe me. I’ve been trying to set up a friendly-fire accident ever since but the bastard was hard to pin down.” He reached down and picked up the Eye of Agamotto from where Maw had dropped it then tossed it to Strange. “On the plus side, I have it on good authority that his people want Thanos stopped as much as we do, so we can worry about figuring out who’s really who and when they were replaced after the Enemy of All Life has been dealt with.

“So stop staring and get a move on it,” Tony said. “We’ve still got a war to win.”


	2. Reflection and Recrimination

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, not a one shot anymore. Still probably a short story, but I’m planning on covering what happens the Team!Cap and Tony afterwards.

**_‘Just like riding a bicycle,’_ Clint thought as he climbed up into the maze of beams supporting the roof of the large, open building.**

**Steve, or the Skrull posing as Steve Rogers, had never really used him as a sniper, as an assassin. As an Avenger, Hawkeye’s role had been to watch his team’s backs in a fight. One of the fliers would help him claim a high perch as the battle began and from there he’d provide warnings and shoot down any threats he could spot. Because it was a battle and he was firing repeatedly, he frequently had to switch positions and usually ended up on the ground in hand-to-hand combat with the bad guys before they were able to declare victory.**

**The Avengers had been a far cry from how S.H.I.E.L.D. had used him, although S.H.I.E.L.D.’s deployments hadn’t been too terribly different from what he’d done before S.H.I.E.L.D. They had paid less than a mercenary of his caliber could command on the open market but they’d promised him that he was making the world a better place. They sent him out with someone to back him up if a job went sour. S.H.I.E.L.D. had a retirement plan that wasn’t an unmarked grave when age slowed him down and some young gun got the better of him. But when S.H.I.E.L.D. sent him out it was his job to put someone in the ground without warning or a chance to fight back.**

**Clint had expected that his years as an Avenger would have made him rusty, but he’d been tracking his target for two weeks before he even realized what his subconscious had decided as his next step. Although, to be fair, he had gotten a refresher course in how a sniper/assassin operated when Tony Stark assumed command of the Avengers.**

 

* * *

 

 

Hawkeye crawled along the face of a skyscraper, twenty stories off the ground, trying not to call any attention to himself. Thanos was coming. He’d seen Captain America shot and killed and turn into an alien imposture and none of that mattered because Thanos was coming.

_They’d had six months warning. Thor returned to Earth with the Hulk, with what little remained of Asgard, with LOKI. On his way back, Thor had ran into a group calling themselves the Guardians of the Galaxy. Thor came to Earth for refuge, the Guardians came with a warning: Thanos was moving. His agents had taken the Reality Stone from an ancient immortal being, leaving his eons old sanctuary a lifeless husk. They’d taken the Power Stone from the seat of an intergalactic Empire hundreds of planets strong, carving away a quarter of the planet’s landmass in the process. Of the remaining four Infinity Gems, two were known to be on Earth and Asgard had been the last known location of the third. Earth was undoubtedly Thanos’ next target, especially with what was left of Asgard settling into a sparsely populated corner of Norway._

_After hearing the Guardian’s warning, Stark had finally called and Steve- Not Steve Rogers, the Skrull imposter- had told him “Of course they’d come back and fight for the Earth… As soon as impediments like the Sokovia Accords were gone.”_

_Stark hadn’t crumpled like they’d all expected given that he’d called. He told Steve- Not Steve- to go screw himself and had started recruiting a new team. They’d worried, especially when they heard that Wakanda, T’Challa and even Bucky Barnes who’d been left in Wakanda to be healed, had given in to UN pressure and swore to fight alongside Stark when the threat came. But Not-Steve had assured them that it would work out. They should have trusted him; Vision had returned to Wanda after they’d broken free of the Raft, driven by guilt for fighting Wanda and for being the cause of Rhodes’ injuries, it had made him malleable and finally willing to accept the truth. Not-Steve had been right about Vision and they should have trusted he’d be right about the UN too…_

Clint grimaced. The Skrull might have been right about their ability to force the UN to back down but that didn’t make the impostor RIGHT, it didn’t make what they had done while following that thing the right course of action.

He crouched behind an ornamental flourish on the older skyscraper and laid out several arrows for easy reach.

  
Down on the streets below Iron Man, Thor, Hulk, Gamora and Drax were going head to head with the remaining members of Thanos’ Black Order in a vicious battle. Ebony Maw had been the group’s strategist, losing him had been a blow to the enemy forces, but when it came to combat Maw was a light-weight compared to the rest of his team.

_While Stark struggled to pull together a new team, while the UN stubbornly refused to accept Not-Steve’s ultimatum, Loki and one of the Guardians or at least an associate of theirs had come up with their own plan. Secretly Loki had brought the Tesseract out of the ruins of Asgard. He and his new ally conspired to use it as bait. They set a trap to lure Thanos out, they over-estimated themselves. When it all went to hell the Guardian, Nebula, managed to get out a warning: Thanos had taken Space Stone, he had the Soul Stone as well as the Reality Stone and the Power Stone. The message cut off mid-word dissolving into screams and then silence._

_After that, with the Guardians and the Asgardians turned persona non grata, the UN had caved. They threw out the Accords and begged the REAL Avengers to come back and save them._

Clint remembered coming back to the Compound, head held high. He remembered sneering at Stark as he welcome them back to the States: Vision might have stood with Stark but he was with them in spirit, with Wanda were he belonged. Spider-Man had been missing, much later they’d come to realize that his absence was mostly likely because Stark or the kid’s aunt had forbidden him from cutting classes, High School classes. Rhodes was the only one left who was actually on Stark's side and with his injuries Rhodes was even more dependent on his armor than Stark had always been.   _'Stark's nothing without his armor.'_

_None of the new people Stark had recruited lived at the Compound. Stark tried to justify it, saying they all had busy lives but it was obvious that the new team wasn’t really much of a team. Pym and van Dyne had barely showed up long enough to drag Scott off and from the looks Pym was shooting Stark it was clear that no love was lost between them. Dr. Strange and his assistant Wong weren’t unfriendly towards Stark but the two of them portaled out the second Avengers’ business ended. Of the motley bunch of street fighters who called themselves “The Defenders” only a few of them had enough power to make any difference in the coming battle. Banner opted to stick with Thor who was staying close to his people. The Guardians also opted to base out of the new Asgardian settlement in Norway. Natasha picked up a rumor that the Guardian’s Gamora had been Nebula’s sister. She and Thor bonded over their lost siblings. Gamora shored up Thor’s belief that, despite how it turned out, Loki and Nebula’s intention had been to destroy Thanos not to aid him and Thor provided Gamora with a sliver of hope, reminding her that their siblings were damned hard to kill._

_Everyone had a reason not to be at the Compound with the restored Avengers. Behind closed doors it was crystal clear that Stark agreed with the sentiment but in the name of rebuilding public confidence and staving off panic in the streets he made a public show of welcoming them back… A show that might have been called into question if he only associated with them on camera. The Avengers returned to the Compound and Stark was with them. He smiled for the cameras and as soon as the Compound doors shut behind him, he vanished into the depths of his lab, only emerging for public appearances and team training exercises._

While Stark’s team confronted the Black Order, Star-Lord, Rocket, Spider-Man, Luke Cage, T’Challa and a few of his bodyguards engaged the bulk of Thanos’ army. The outer perimeter of the battlefield was being controlled by the reborn Iron Legion along with traditional military forces, they were charged with turning back anything that got past Iron Man or Star Lord’s teams. Under Daredevil’s direction a fourth group of heroes: Falcon, Mantis, Groot, Colleen Wing and Misty Knight were responsible for evacuating any civilians still trapped inside the perimeter. Clint took a deep breath and reminded himself that his orders were NOT to reveal himself unless Thanos made an appearance.

With FRIDAY assisting Stark and Spider-Man’s Karen in the kid’s suit there were an unprecedented number of AI’s on the field. A few months ago even the Wakandan developed remote systems that had been installed in the Iron Legion along with Wakandan energy shields would have brought up the spectre of Ultron but with shape-shifting aliens discovered to have infiltrated the highest ranks of the Avengers… Well, it turned out Ultron was considered old news by most of Earth’s defense force.

_The image of the dead alien wearing Captain America’s uniform dominated the conference room and the thoughts of the people gathered there. “What if there are others?” Everett Ross demanded. “What do we do?”_

_“Nothing,” Stark said shortly. “Nothing now. Thanos is the immediate problem. They’re not on his side, so the enemy of my enemy… Well they’re no friends but until Thanos hits the floor they won’t move on us.”_

_“You’re basing this evaluation on what? Your noted people skills?” Natasha asked pointedly._

_“I knew he wasn’t Steve Rogers for over a month. When did you figure it out again?” Stark asked, no longer bothering to hide the venom in his voice as he had since Steve’s ‘talk’ with him. ‘Not Steve,’ Clint reminded himself forcing down the nausea bubbling up in his gut. “That thing.”_

_“You should have told us,” Sam growled._

_Stark turned away, subtly dismissing the Avengers who’d followed Steve Rogers, followed the Skrull, during the Avengers’ Civil War. “We have a guy who’s very special brand of crazy is driving him to wipe out half of every, single, sentient species in the galaxy.”_

_“No,” The Guardian’s Gamora interrupted. “Thanos’ designs are not limited to sentient species. It’s his goal to kill half of all that lives.”_

_“My mistake,” Stark acknowledge her correction with a nod. “The Earth has been invaded by hostile, shape-shifting aliens who can apparently mimic memories, Enhanced strength and reflexes, I’m not out to minimize that. It is certainly bad. But we’ve got a guy who is out ot kill half of everything that lives on our doorstep. Everything, and I do mean EVERYTHING else can wait until he’s been neutralized.”_

_“Now, I’ve been working with Wakanda’s Princess Shuri,” Stark nodded to the girl who had joined the after action review via a holographic interface. Then he grimaced. “Because Wakanda doesn’t trust me with their tech, I’ve turned over fifty Iron Legionaries to her. She added Wakanda energy shields and a kick ass remote control system. Between the two of us and her big brother we’ve agreed on three pilots: Colonel Rhodes, Everett Ross and Princess Shuri herself. Shuri can handle two units just using the remotes, Rhodey and Ross can handle one unit each. If Wakanda approves it, I can activate FRIDAY’s sibling units JOCASTA and TODASHI, with their assistance all fifty units can be brought on line.”_

_“After what your Ultron did to my country you dare!” Wanda hissed at Stark._

_“Wanda’s right, Stark can’t be trusted with stuff like that,” Clint found himself saying even though Tony’s remark about not being trusted with Wakandan tech added a new twist to the revolt brewing in his stomach._

_Shuri gave Wanda a disdainful look. “Tony Stark makes seven learning programs that are friendly to humans, four of which are complex enough to pass themselves off as human, he does this without your powers influencing him. With your powers influencing him he makes one learning program which immediately develops a maniacal hatred of humanity and tries to wipe out the species. The data says that the problem is you,” Shuri announced. “I find FRIDAY, Vision, Karen- Even DUM-E, U and Butterfingers delightful creations and I wish I’d been able to meet JARVIS. I would be delighted team up with JOCASTA and TADASHI.”_

_“You are NOT learning to make Artificial Intelligences,” T’Challa muttered to his sister. “I forbid it. You would create an army of minions before I knew it.” Shuri smirked at her older brother and for a brief second a real smile broke through Stark’s public relations mask._

_Then Shuri’s expression turned serious and challenging. She gestured to the imposter Captain America. “Also, it would seem that it is past time Wakanda revisited certain decisions about what, WHO we trust. It was that creature which advised us against trusting Tony with so much as access to our medical techniques.”_

Then and now, Clint found himself tasting bile as he remembered the Princess’s challenge and startled hope on Tony and Rhodes’ faces that it engendered.

_Several months after the Exiled Avengers had broken out of the Raft and gone their separate ways to avoid drawing too much attention, King T’Challa had contacted Clint and asked to speak with Steve. Seventy-two hours later Steve showed up at the farm -The farm Clint had returned to only to find it empty and abandoned.- with Sam and Wanda in tow. “Did something happen to Bucky?” Steve demanded._

_“I apologize for worrying you,” T’Challa said. “No, Sargent Barnes is doing very well. My sister is extremely pleased with his progress. Tony Stark recently contacted me and I wished to ask your opinion of him. Despite our association during the battle in Leipzig, I do not know him well.”_

_“You can’t trust anything Stark says,” Sam declared. “I trusted him to go to Steve as friend and Barnes came back short an arm because of it.”_

_“Is he looking for Bucky?” Steve asked._

_“Please, could you listen to this recording and THEN give me your opinion of his motives?” T’Challa asked._

_Tony’s voice came on the line, startlingly clear for a recording. “So, I happened across the report Ross, the decent Ross, filed on Wakanda right after your latest and greatest UN address. I gather repairing spinal cord injuries is trivial for your doctors?”_

_“My council is reviewing what technology it is safe for Wakanda to share with the outer world,” T’Challa replied in the recording. “Everett Ross’ circumstances were exceptional.”_

_“Yeah, he got shot protecting someone you love,” Tony said bluntly. “You allied yourself with Rhodey, agreed to fight alongside him… And you left him bleeding on the pavement without a hint that you could have helped.”_

_T’Challa didn’t say anything._

_“I’ve been to Magic-Land, apparently the Sorcerer Supreme can’t help him. Either as the Western World’s greatest neurosurgeon or via magic. I get Rhodey not having any innate magical talent to develop into a cure but… Why didn’t you help him?” Tony asked, begged._

_“I will bring Colonel Rhodes’ circumstances to the Council's attention,” T’Challa said noncommittally._

_“We were on a team together, doesn’t that mean anything to anyone?” Tony demanded then his voice shaded into bitterness. “Or is only personal connections who get loyalty, screw professional relations. When should I expect to see Barnes with trigger free brain and a Wakandan-model prosthetic arm?”_

_“I am uncertain as to what you’re referring to,” T’Challa said._

_“Fine! Play it that way. You owed Ross for shielding your girl. Vision shielded YOU when Rogers’ reckless new size-changing flunky decided to throw a fuel tanker at you. Vision saved your life! He’s tearing himself apart about Rhodey’s injuries. Don’t you owe him a little peace of mind?” Then they heard Tony’s breath drawn in sharply. “I’m sorry,” he said stiffly. “I’m- I’m a little messed up. Rhodey deserves better. He was injured fighting alongside you, in support of legislation that your father, the late King of Wakanda championed, doesn’t your code of honor mean you owe him something? Ross said he was completely healed within hours of being shot, barely a scar, it’s not like it would cost you anything to help Rhodey. Don’t punish him for being my friend.”_

_“I’ll bring it to the Council’s attention,” T’Challa reiterated and the recording ended._

_When Clint glanced around at his teammates he saw Wanda grinning broadly while Sam and Steve both looked serious. “Tony know Bucky is in Wakanda,” Steve muttered._

_“He could be using Jim’s injuries as an excuse to get close to Bucky?” Sam offered._

_“What I saw of Wakandan technology seemed very advanced when you rescued us from that horrible prison Stark condemned us to, nearly as advanced as Thor’s people,” Wanda said innocently. “Remember Ultron and all the damage Stark caused? He can’t be given access to that sort of technology, who knows what sort of disaster he would bring down on our heads.”_

_Steve gave Wanda an approving nod, “She’s right, your majesty. Tony can’t be trusted not to mess with things beyond his understanding.” He hesitated, “Maybe you could offer assistance to Colonel Rhodes directly… If he’d keep it from Tony. He’s an honorable man, if he gave his word you could trust him.”_

Clint remembered thinking that it sucked for Rhodes but still, he’d looked around his home, abandoned by his family and had to admit that denying Stark something he desperately wanted had felt good. Just like it had felt good, vindicating when they came back to the Compound to find Stark all alone, stripped of any allies.

Even then he’d taken a surprisingly long time to cave and admit that he’d been wrong all along about the Accords, about everything. But once he did, Clint had watched the Black Order ships land on Earth feeling confident about the battle to come. The reborn Avengers were stronger, more unified than ever: Captain America, the Scarlet Witch, the Black Widow, Hawkeye, Falcon, Barnes now calling himself White Wolf, a properly chastened Vision and Stark back where he belonged as the tech guy and team consultant. They’d had the support of Wakanda’s military, Thor and his shield brothers, the Hulk. Even the new guys Stark had brought in had promise, although they weren’t really Avengers.

_The first battle against Thanos’ forces took place on the plains just outside of Wakanda. The four members of the Black Order took the field like gods of war but the Avengers and their allies didn’t flinch from meeting them. Stark’s second stringers, T’Challa’s people and Thor’s friends were left to deal with the rank and file while the nine Avengers plus the Black Panther and Stark confronted the Order._

_Gradually the battle royal broke down into smaller fights. Captain America took on the Order’s leader, Corvus Glaive, with his closest friends Falcon and White Wolf at his side. Thor and Hulk challenged Obsidian Cull, the Order’s bruiser, along with T’Challa. The Black Widow, Scarlet Witch and Hawkeye faced off against Proxima Midnight, a spear-wielding woman with a psychotic smile. Which left Iron Man and Vision, the only member of the team who didn’t resent having to work with Stark, against Ebony Maw. The four battles shifted back and forth across the field, weaving between the lesser fights. Then, suddenly, Wanda was on her knees ensnared in Midnight’s spear-turned-net and Maw was whispering in her ear. Cull had drawn Thor, Hulk and T’Challa far from the others. The lower level fighters went mad, swarming the Avengers’ allies and Cap’s unit with no concern for their own lives. A moment later Wanda screamed and a blood red mist exploded from her. As it enveloped the battle Natasha, Stark and Barnes also screamed._

_Clint retreated from the miasma. He saw Barnes go down and Cap standing over him, fiercely protecting his friend. He saw Glaive send Falcon smashing to the ground. From his vantage point Clint fired arrow after arrow to keep Thanos’ foot soldiers away from Natasha as she knelt, hands fisted in her hair. Glaive, Midnight and Maw ganged up against Vision. Wanda was lost in the thickest of the blood red mist, even Thanos’ berserkers didn’t venture too near. Iron Man stood stiffly, his movements jerky and robotic, he went to Vision’s aid but it wasn’t enough. While Maw drove him back, Midnight pinned Vision to the ground, Glaive stood over the synthoid and drove the butt of his weapon into Vision’s face until his skull was smashed then picked the Mind Stone out of the ruins._

They’d felt so sure that, together, they could handle anything but it all turned to ash when the Earth’s defensive forces turned to Stark to lead them. _‘Well, who else was going to lead? Captain America is a dead alien spy. Rhodes can’t physically be in the field. T’Challa’s first loyalty is to Wakanda not the world, if they promised him that Wakanda would be in the half of the human race that Thanos left intact I’d be hard pressed to blame him for taking the deal. The Guardians are too much of an unknown to put them in charge.’_ Stark projected none of Steve’s adamant confidence that they could- no, would win, that their righteousness would carry the battle. In its place Stark had a grim determination to do whatever was necessary to buy them the slimmest hope of victory.

They’d thwarted three attacks on the New York Sanctum since the imposter had been revealed and Maw was killed. There was an electric tension in the air, everyone knew that Thanos would take a personal hand in ending the siege soon. Early that morning Stark had pulled Clint and Barnes aside, he had a clip of ammo in Bucky’s preferred calibur and six gleaming arrows. “Pretend you’re actually the legendary snipers you’re both reputed to be instead of joining in on the hand-to-hand,” he’d ordered. Stark had also told the Guardian’s Kraglin Obfonteri to hold back from the fighting until he had a chance to try his luck against Thanos with his Yaka Arrow. “We’ll take care of the the Black Order, trust us to do our jobs. Because when we do, Thanos will show up and HE is your only objective. Put one of these in him. Before he knows you’re there, please.” Clint hadn’t been privy to Wasp or Ant-Man’s orders but since he hadn’t seen them on the field he assumed that they had a similar mission. Then there was the other sniper, the guy no one was naming because if they weren’t all so busy fighting a war with aliens they should be trying to apprehend him to stop his very high body count, one-man war on organized crime. Clint didn’t know whether or not Tony armed Frank Castle and he didn’t want to know.

 _‘I’d follow Sam. If we’d lost Steve under other circumstances he’d have been the natural successor,’_ Clint thought as he watched the battle unfold below. _‘But as it is? Everyone else thinks we’re the ones most likely to be harboring another Skrull…Maybe they’re right._

 _‘Maybe they’re right to go with ANYONE other than my pick. S.H.I.E.L.D. was HYDRA and I didn’t know. Loki brainwashed me into following him. I vouch for Maximoff, had her back against all comers, then she deserts when the going gets tough. Captain America was an infiltrator-'_ Clint felt his muscles go taunt and consciously forced himself to relax so he wouldn’t miss his shot if it came. _'Stark said he’d known since we set up that talk so Steve could clear the air. Only it wasn’t Steve and they didn’t exactly ‘talk’, or that wasn’t all that happened. Does anyone else even know? Stark hasn’t said anything- Well, anything about that. Would he have told us if I hadn’t opened my fucking mouth? What good are my eyes when they’re attached to a for-shit brain? I saw, but I only saw what I wanted to see. Does anyone else know what happened? Do I talk to Stark… Rhodes maybe? Fuck, what do I do?'_

Clint spotted a glint out of the corner of his eye and spent a few seconds determining that it was Barnes and not one of Thanos’ forces.

Thor and Drax were working together to wear down Obsidian Cull. The Hulk had truly gotten fed up with Corvus Glaive’s healing abilities, as Clint watched the Hulk ripped the regenerator limb from limb and hurled the parts in opposite directions. Iron Man and Gamora were struggling against the powers of Proxima Midnight’s spear but they were holding her and it wouldn’t be long before the rest of the heavy-hitters could converge on the soon-to-be last survivor of the Black Order. Daredevil had started assigning his team to fight against Thanos’ army as the last few civilians were shuttled outside of the battle’s perimeter. If nothing changed Thanos’ forces would lose, this time they wouldn’t be able to regroup. If nothing changed. Clint took a few deep, steadying breaths. It was about time for Thanos to make his entrance.

_'Coulson and Fury both died, sure Fury’s was faked and Coulson… got better… What if he didn’t? It was some sort of alien thing that brought Coulson back. What if it didn’t? What if they just replaced him and said it cured him. And Fury, if he can fake dying, they could have faked him NOT dying. From what Stark has said, the Cap-Skrull claimed that he replaced the real Steve sometime after everything that went down with Ultron… Assuming we can believe him. Just because the Skrull didn’t think Tony would talk doesn’t mean he had nothing to gain by lying. Maybe S.H.I.E.L.D. never really found Captain America at all, I mean Enhanced or not, what are the odds of a human successfully being put into cryogenic hibernation via crashing into the Arctic Ocean? Maybe he was always a Skrull. It wouldn’t have been hard for him, for the Skrull, to switch Wilson, not with all the off the books missions the two of them pulled. I would have noticed if they’d switched Nat, I WOULD have noticed. Without thinking about it, Clint’s arrow began tracking his teammates’ movements. Stark’s safe, no way he would have revealed the invasion if he were one of them. Thor and Bruce both vanish for years and come back friends with LOKI. Vision didn’t turn green, er greener when Glaive ripped the Mind Stone out of his skull, he’s safe, safe and dead. Lang’s probably safe, probably didn’t get on anyone’s radar soon enough, or maybe there never was a Lang, maybe they created him to get someone on the team. Wakanda, maybe the whole country’s aliens. Barnes, It’d explain why the other Skrull went so far to protect him.'_

Clint realized that he’d drawn his bow string back to his cheek and he had aimed just behind where he’d seen the glint, where Barnes’ head would be if the glint was his scope. He yanked the bow off target.

Misty Knight borrowed one of Rocket’s oversized guns and both of them were using Luke Cage as a mobile fortress. The three of them formed an unstoppable phalanx, smashing through the enemy lines and leaving them in disarray.

 _'Or maybe that’s just how the Skrull thought the real Steve Rogers would act. I lost everything, lost my family, all for him. I thought it must have been something important for Steve to call me but…'_ Clint felt the heavy weight of a heavily creased slip of paper in his hip pocket. His aim started straying back toward Barnes’ position again. He jerked the bow away again.

Iron Man and Gamora fell back as the Hulk roared in Proxima Midnight’s face. Since his return from Sakaar the Hulk had been more more communicative, even sociable in sense but the rest of them still cleared out when Hulk picked a target to smash. Drax brought both fists down on Cull’s skull then Thor called the lightning, pouring it on until Cull was smoldering husk.

Midnight’s spear transformed into a net, it was only a flimsy looking thing but somehow the weight of it was enough to bring down the Hulk. However that left her unarmed and facing Thor, Iron Man, Drax and Gamora.

From Clint’s perspective, as he corrected his aim away from his fellow sniper’s position for the fifth time, it was almost a relief when Thanos suddenly appeared in the middle of the battlefield beside Midnight. “You failed me,” Thanos said. Clint exhaled, slowly drawing his bow string back to his cheek. Midnight bowed her head, she made no move to defend herself as Thanos’ gloved hand lashed out. As the Mad Titan stood there, his hand wrist deep in his last general’s chest cavity, Clint released. Thanos was engulfed in a massive ball of flames. For several moments the world held its breath. As the flames died out the sound of Thanos’ laughter echoed across the battlefield.

 

* * *

 

 

Clint perched on the end of Natasha’s bed in the medical wing of the compound. He looked past her, hating the way she looked so small and defenseless with her eyes closed with an oxygen mask and several monitors attached to her. “I’m guessing when the docs said talk to you they meant cheerful stuff. I wish I could think of something like that.”

He was silent for several minutes. “I’m not sure I should stay. I’m not sure how to get out. We’re in the middle of a war, the Avengers aren’t technically an army or anything, getting the Accords thrown out kept us from that but… Even if it’s not technically going AWOL, walking out on my side in the middle of a war sort of feels like desertion. But- Nat, today? Today I kept thinking about shooting my teammate in the back.

“Can’t even really tell you why I was so fixated on Barnes- You know there was a couple of minutes when I was halfway convinced I was a Skrull. When’d I suddenly start hating Stark- Tony? Why did it suddenly not bother me that Wanda could get in my head the way Loki did? Started thinking maybe I was a Skrull and I just didn’t know it, that I was a Skrull programed to think that I was Clint Barton. Crazy stuff, but somehow out of everyone I thought might be a Skrull, it was Barnes I kept thinking about shooting.

“Did you see what I saw? Did you look at Tony, at Steve and decide to let it mean what you wanted it to mean? Or was it all on me?”

“We keep saying how we all made mistakes, like that means the other guy’s mistakes cancel ours out and we’re left with a clean slate.” Clint shook his head, “I think this what Tony was talking when he called the arms business was a zero accountability system: We’re all wrong so none of us are going to change and somehow that’s okay, just the way things are.”

“Sure we all made mistakes, it doesn’t change that I screwed up. I screwed up, Nat. When we came back Tony didn’t want anything to do with us. He demanded that Rhodes and Ross 2.0 observe every training exercise and be involved in every planning meeting. Sure, he was making the rounds with Cap, assuring the media and the politicians that we were ready and willing but we never saw him outside of required training once we reached the Compound, not even Bruce or Thor when they came by.

“He didn’t want anything to do with us Nat. But the day after we brought down his security measures to get Steve access to him, I saw him with bruises around his wrist and a tell-tale limp and I assumed he wanted it when I knew he didn’t even want to be in the same room with us. What sort of moron am I?”

_“You’re wearing the suit to breakfast now Stark?” Clint asked sarcastically. “And I thought we were all trying to be friends again.”_

_“Stark does not know how to be a friend,” Wanda sneered._

_Clint felt a frisson of adrenaline shoot down his spine. It had been almost two weeks since Steve’s talk with Stark. Afterwards Stark had finally apologized for the Raft, their exile and everything else they’d demanded apologies for, something that made Clint suspicious right there. Stark had been much less abrasive since then, not really arguing about anything but it felt like the moment before the other shoe dropped more than a cease fire._

_“What’s the problem?” Stark asked. “We all remember my fortieth birthday? Well, actually, you all remember my party, I remember the video highlights Pepper required me to watch before tendering public apologies and having donuts in the suit the next morning. Donuts are great for hangovers. Although not as good as being shot up with mystery whatever,” he nodded toward Natasha._

_Steve frowned, “It really isn’t appropriate.”_

_“Do you remember me getting personal with the helicarrier turbines?” Tony asked, talking fast. “Well, I remember. Got chewed up, spat out and just a few bumps and bruises for my troubles. But that was the old, inconvenient, needs an assembly platform to get in or out of armor. I made, well- I considered them improvements. Armors I could get in or out of in the field, convenient… But it turns out not so heavy duty. Hinged joints instead of bolted on plates, easier to damage, less protection. We’re gearing up for war here. Besides you always hated when I left the suit in a battle. ‘A civilian without it’, your words. Now I can’t get out of it anywhere but in my lab. No ability to disregard your orders, you should love that, right? We’ve got practice after breakfast. You said be here for breakfast, team-building. I don’t have time to have to eat with the team, go down to the lab, get into the armor AND be on time for practice. So compromise, right? I get into the armor first, eat in the armor and I’m on time. I’m the only one inconvenience, that’s the definition of compromise around here isn’t it?”_

_“What if we get called out in a hurry?” Natasha asked._

_“I’ve still got several of the lighter versions if need be,” Tony said. “But don’t worry yourself. I’m not planning on being caught off guard again.”_

“We were living with Tony at the Compound but how many times did we see him outside of the armor these last two months?” Clint asked. “He’d take the helmet off and lean against the wall for team meals and it started after- After that day, the day we broke his security. And I knew, I knew what happened. Did anyone else realize? When it didn’t turn into a relationship I wrote it off as a itch they both needed to scratch. I KNEW Tony started literally bolting himself into the fucking armor after and I didn’t put two and two together. I didn’t want to figure it out. Even if Laura would have me back I don’t know that I could bring myself to look her in the eye.”

“I said I wasn’t sure how to get out, you know that’s a lie. I know how to disappear, maybe not as thoroughly as you, but I know enough. What I don’t know is how to leave and still be able to come back. If I leave you guys like this, in the middle of the fighting- Hell, I don’t even know if you’ll forgive me for leaving you helpless like this, especially given everything that’s going on. If I leave there’s not going to be anyone left for me to turn to.

“Nat, I saw what I wanted to see not what was there. Now I’m seeing Skrulls everywhere. I feel like shit for leaving you like this, the Docs keep saying you could wake up any day, but if I stay I’m going to kill someone and I don’t guarantee it’s going to be a bad guy. I don’t know where I go from here. Don’t know that there’s any place to go, but I can’t stay.”

 

* * *

 

 

**Vendors set up their booths, never looking up, never seeing the sniper positioned in the rafters. Clint took out the paper he’d found left for him between the pages of the family bible in his empty home: A grocery list in Laura’s hand, used as a bookmark. A coded message, the last word he’d heard from his family. Once decrypted the message had been painfully short, “You’re compromised.”**

**People trickled in, slowly at first but within a half hour there was a good crowd milling below. Clint raised his bow as he spotted dark, curly hair, a fitted red top and a flowing skirt.**  
**He remembered feeling pleasure at the thought of Tony’s friend being denied a cure. He remembered approving when Steve sent Sam and Wanda to make contact with Vision when they heard the synthoid was emotionally vulnerable. He remembered feeling vindicated upon seeing Tony left isolated and without support. He remembered standing guard while several floors below his teammate was being raped.**

**Clint didn’t remember when or why he stopped caring that Wanda had the power to go into his mind. The night after the imposter Steve Rogers died, when it became obvious that Tony would be the one Earth’s defenders turned to, Wanda disappeared from the compound. Even with a head start it hadn’t been hard for Clint to track her steps, he and Natasha had taught her everything she knew about undercover work after all.**

**He drew back the string of his bow, breathed out and released. The arrow flew true and sank cleanly into the unprotected nape of Wanda’s neck, severing her spinal cord and killing her instantly.**

**Clint watched the market explode into panic and chaos beneath him and waited for the world to start making sense again. He waited for Wanda’s corpse to turn green or a fog to lift from him mind. He waited for a sign that he was the man he’d been before: The clear-eyed marksman who’d sighted the infamous Black Widow down the length of an arrow and seen someone who could be turned, saved. The guy who could go home to a family he loved, who could look himself in the mirror.**

**He waited. The market cleared, leaving Wanda’s body lying where it fell, two and a half stories below. Nervous police officers milled around the outskirts, setting up a perimeter. Clint waited.**

**He leaned over the side of the beam he was perched on, a like a first time diver. As his center of gravity shifted away from the beam he crouched on he began to feel the Earth’s pull. _‘Nothing changed.’_ He leaned a bit further and let himself fall.**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I saw Black Panther, it's not bad, better than I was expecting from what I've seen of Shuri in fanfiction since it was revealed that she's a teenager. No effort to retcon the Accords to make them worse than they were in CACW (Heroes can still have big fights in foreign cities without so much as a slap on the wrist). Debate is still boring in the eyes of the MCU, so Wakanda's wonderful, enlightened, system of government uses trial by combat to settle political questions. 
> 
> But here's a little bit that's a problem for larger continuity: Shuri made it look trivial to fix the damage when Everett Ross was shot, explicitly stated that the bullet caused spinal cord damage. The movie ended with T’Challa apparently coming forward with Wakanda’s true technological status to the UN... And Rhodey is shown using braces to walk in the most recent IW trailer. Given the creative team’s statements about why Tony and Pepper were broken up in CACW, I’m going to assume that similar logic applies to why Wakanda couldn’t (didn’t) heal Rhodey’s injuries: Tony’s not allowed to have a support system.


	3. Might Have Beens

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One of my more generous thoughts about AoU-Steve “I'm not leaving this rock with one civilian on it.” vs. CACW-Steve “We try to save as many people as we can. Sometimes that doesn't mean everybody.” is that Sokovia shook him up. Wanda abandons her post to seek revenge for Pietro, Ultron gets to the device and completes his plan. Sokovia is falling, Tony and Thor have to finish their counter-plan before it impacts. There’s a minute or so where Steve has a chance to think that maybe he doomed the whole world by trying to save everyone and THAT is why his tune has changed in CACW.

As he stepped into the building Steve put a hand in the small box and winced as it took a few drops of his blood. Once he would have protested the dangers of having his serum enhanced blood out of his control but these days it’s an accepted necessity: As Skrulls reverted to their natural form upon death, their blood reverted once separated from the body. _‘Bucky would probably be the first to shoot if I refused and Tony assured everyone that the devices were designed to be destructive,’_ Steve thought. _‘It’s just too bad Skrull blood is red. If people had found green or silver blood on clothes or the ground after battles they might have asked questions sooner.’_

He waited three minutes while a heavily armed guard on the other side of the transparisteel barrier watched him warily then the light on the top of the box flashed green and the building’s interior door opened. Sadly he remembered being told, _‘The Skrull do not fight as honest men. They steal trust. And for this they are hated with an unrivaled passion.’_

When Steve arrived Thor, Natasha, Rhodes, Danvers and the Guardian Gamora were already in the conference room. Steve hadn’t met Gamora or known Rhodes in more than passing before his abduction. Thor had gained gravity and perspicacity in exchange for the loss of his eye and his hair. Natasha was pale and wane, still shaky after nearly two weeks in a coma. She kept her back to the wall and didn’t meet anyone’s eyes. It was unsettling to realize that Danvers was the closest thing to a familiar face in the room. King T’Challa and the Accords Resentative joined them a few minutes later, the two of them chatting in a companionable fashion that Steve didn’t want to be jealous of but none of the few pockets of comfort left among the Avengers included him. Everett Ross steer T’Challa toward the empty seats on Rhodes’ side of the table, “Don’t tell me we’re late?” Ross asked with a friendly nod to Rhodes.

“Tony said he was going to come,” Rhodes said, tossing a scowl in Steve’s direction.

“Change of plan,” Steve started at the Irish-accented voice of Tony’s new AI, still expecting to hear J.A.R.V.I.S. A few moments later the monitor at the front of the room came to life, it showed Tony in his lab, in his armor minus the helmet. _‘Does he live in it these days?’_ Steve wondered. Tony hadn’t bothered to cover the signs of exhaustion and weight loss. He wasn’t using the ‘media persona’ Steve remembered finding annoying before his kidnapping but in its place was a blankness that was worse.

 _‘They told me you were the one who discovered the imposture and revealed it- Killed it,’_ Steve thought. _‘What did he do to you Tony?’_ It was inappropriate, ill-timed and would raise even more questions about his sanity so Steve bit down on the urge to giggle, _‘A little hysteria could be nice… As long as no one took it into their head to shoot me for not acting like Captain America but, by God, I think I’m entitled! Abducted by aliens, travel halfway across the galaxy and get back just in time to fight a lunatic who wanted to destroy have of all things living… And yet, I’m right back where I started: Watching Tony pull away while I fail to find the words to say what needs saying.'_

* * *

 

**Sam’s feet were bare. Bare feet sticking out of thin greyish pants, his arms wrapped around his knees as he sat on the floor.**

**Steve blinked a few times. His face itched. Lifting an arm to scratch at the itch seemed like more trouble than it was worth.**

**Sam was talking. After a while the words started trickling through the haze wrapped around Steve’s brain and gradually assembled into comprehensible sentences. “It’s weird, we never really talk about how they took us. I mean I know how they got to you, of course I know, but we don’t talk about it. I suppose I know why: I mean, I don’t want to but some days I do blame you. I’m guessing you feel the same about me sometimes. It was that mission in Oregon by the way, I’d only known you for a few months.”**

Steve sat in the back of the Quinjet hunched over his cell phone. “Sam, how’s it going?”

“Hey, I just got to Hood River,” Sam protested. “The Columbia Gorge is gorgeous but our nice sniper doesn’t stand out as much as the scenery. This might take awhile.”

“Be careful,” Steve said. “We don’t know that it’s really Bucky. And if it is him, we don’t want to spook him.” Natasha’s contacts had brought a new mercenary to their attention: A sniper who was both very good and very choosy about his targets. He’d killed three people in the four months since the Battle of Triskelion, two of them had ties to HYDRA and the third had been involved in human trafficking. Steve didn’t believe Bucky would want to make a living as a killer for hire but with the targets involved? Steve knew he’d have done something about them if they’d still been breathing.

_“Not everyone has a Tony Stark. People need to make a living,” Natasha said. “And Barnes doesn’t have a wide variety of marketable skills. He’s good enough that he can afford to be choosy about his targets. That’s... Not so shabby Steve.”_

_Steve didn’t say anything about how awkward, how wrong it felt to be using Stark’s money to fund his search for Bucky but something of what he was thinking must have shown on his face._

_“After what happened in D.C. no one could say that keeping the Winter Soldier out of HYDRA’s hands isn’t a worthwhile use of Avengers’ funding,” Sam offered. “Just because he was able to break HYDRA’s conditioning for you doesn’t mean that it’s totally gone. Steve, I know how much he means to YOU but, at the same time, facing him again? That’s nightmare territory for me. I thought I was DEAD when he ripped my wings off and kicked me over the side of the Helicarrier.”_

_“That wasn’t Bucky,” Steve said. Then he frowned, his fingers clenched and spread, trying to show that he knew the words were coming out wrong. “I mean- The person we fought, he is NOT my Bucky, not the guy I knew, but toward the end I could see Bucky was still inside him, struggling to get out.”_

_“I know,” Sam agreed gently. “He’s your friend and you want to help him. He deserves help. At the same time, this is the right thing for everyone because there’s a real possibility that he’s still dangerous, or if HYDRA gets him again, they could make him back into their Winter Soldier. Finding him is the right thing to do, no matter how you cut it.”_

_“Right,” Natasha agreed. She patted Steve on the shoulder, “Just because you’re helping your friend in the process doesn’t mean that you’re doing a bad thing. You’re overthinking this.”_

_“I just- Given what we found- It doesn’t feel right,” Steve stammered._

_“I’m sure Stark does understand intellectually,” Sam said. “He is funding our search after all. But the heart isn’t so easy to convince, this has got to be causing him a lot of turmoil- I remember when it happened, there were rumors flying that Howard Stark caused the crash driving drunk and even over a decade later the tabloids would dredge those rumors up again for the anniversary of their deaths pretty much every year. -Barnes is the only readily available target for Stark’s emotions to attach themselves to. Wanting to keep his distance is healthy. I mean if we had any sort of oversight I’m sure they’d demand that he recuse himself from the situation.”_

“I have no intention of getting personal with our good assassin no matter who he is,” Sam assured Steve. “If it’s him you’ll be the first to know, if it’s not… Actually what’s the plan if the guy playing judge, jury and executioner isn’t Barnes? Do we just leave him running around? He is killing people, scum yeah, but technically still human.”

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” Steve said. “Sorry Sam, gotta go, the team’s giving me impatient looks.”

“Good luck with your HYDRA base,” Sam said.

 **Steve remembered hunching over his cell phone, half turned toward the wall with Natasha distracting Tony, Bruce and Thor so he could have some privacy. He remembered dozens of conversations abruptly cut off when Tony walked into a room.** _“Clique, change the channel. Are we in a bad high school movie? You do realize, if I actually cared about what you two- Three? Does Wilson count? -always have your heads together to whisper about, I’d just have J.A.R.V.I.S. provide a transcript, or fuck, save the audiofeed?”_ **After that they’d held their conferences about Bucky outside of the Tower.**

**“I was such an idiot,” Sam sighed. “I’m no PI, didn’t have clue as to how to go about finding someone, especially someone trained to go unnoticed. So when I see this guy with shaggy hair and a ball cap pulled low over his eyes walking past my hotel room I called it a lucky break and took off after him. I was so fixed on not losing sight of him, I never saw the other guy come up behind me.”**

**Steve realized that the floor was surprisingly not-hard under his cheek. He realized that he was lying on the floor. His face still itched. He found the motivation to reach up and scratch at his cheek.**

**“The next thing I know, I’m waking up to see a bunch of alien clustered round my body… which is on the other side of the room. I thought I was having an out of body experience while watching aliens probe my body. Then they did something with one of their machines and what I thought was my body was screaming… That’s how they got our memories. The machine, I don’t know how they got them from me, I was out for that, but after they used the machine he started reciting off my biographical data… And after a few minutes he started sounding natural, like he was me instead of just being programed with my memories.”**

**_‘There are red flakes under my nails.’_ Steve frowned at his hands. Slowly it sunk in that his skin itched because his face was covered in dried blood.**

**Sam noticed he was awake. Steve watched him stand up, watched his feet walk over to the corner of the cell with the tap. There was a thick coating of some sort of foam over the pipe that Steve didn’t remember from before. Sam wetted a rag and brought it back then tossed it on the ground beside Steve.**

**“Sorry, I’d have done more but after that stunt I guess they’re worried about what else we might try.” Sam pointed to a collar full of blinking lights around his neck. “It won’t let me get within two feet of you,” he explained. He gave Steve a smile that wasn’t exactly happy. “I’m counting it as lucky that they didn’t decide to put us in solitary. After that first year, the year before they took you… Maybe it’s rotten of me to say this, but I don’t think I could take anymore of being alone.”**

**‘A year, a year before they took me. It wasn’t Sam for a year,’ Steve thought. He remembered being taken.**

It had been four days since Novi Grad fell. S.H.I.E.L.D. had landed the Helicarrier near the crater and the bulk of the refugees were camped in the shadow of the giant ship. Steve, Clint and Natasha trudged back toward the carrier after another long day of searching the surrounding countryside for anyone hurt or killed by the debris from the falling city.

“I heard some talk about Wanda,” Clint said. “People remember her and her brother going with HYDRA. It doesn’t mean what it would in the US, HYDRA was in league with what passed for a government around here but… People saw her using her powers and have a pretty good idea of where they came from.”

“That’s not going to be the case much longer,” Natasha replied. “People in the castle up on the hill playing Dr. Frankenstein. A monster deciding to use their city as ground zero for an attack on all humanity.” She shook her head, “The survivors are asking why they were targeted and the answers that they’re coming up with… Well, I think it’s safe to say that anyone known for tolerating HYDRA would be smart to disappear before Sokovia figures out who’s running the show now. There is some gratitude towards Wanda for opposing Ultron but…  It won’t last long if she tries to stay. Feeling against the Enhanced in general are running high around here after what happened.”

“I’ll talk to Wanda. I think she’ll listen to me,” Clint said. Then he frowned at Natasha and Steve. “The rest of you need to bond with her. You know I have other commitments, can’t keep being the responsible, levelheaded member of the team forever.”

Natasha rolled her eyes, “Laura’s opinion is biased and based on limited data about your maturity level she’s not around to be a good influence.”

 _‘Wanda was a big help against Ultron and I can imagine how she feels, losing her brother like that but we don’t have a common enemy anymore. The way she thinks, she’s like an angry kid just searching for a target. Left to her own devices she could fall in with anyone,’_ Steve thought. And Clint wasn’t the only one who’d been hearing whispers, Steve had heard talk of into Ultron. _‘With Bruce running off like that it’ll put all the blame on Tony,'_   he worried.

Shortly after they entered the Helicarrier they split up, Natasha and Clint turning toward the showers while Steve headed toward the bridge to report the day’s actions. On the way up Steve ran into Tony. Tony’s head was tilted to the side, a wireless headset hooked over one ear, darkly shadowed eyes distant. “Yeah, the housing units are working out.” When he saw Steve Tony held up a hand. Steve waited for him to finish his call. “The food situation isn’t terrible but call around, there’s gotta be at least a couple chefs who could use some good publicity, better food would help keep everyone’s morale up.”

“Everything going well?” Steve asked when Tony signed off.

“The Red Cross is fully supplied and on their way, they should be here before we run S.H.I.E.L.D.'s supplies dry. Food and shelter are... not bad and getting better, at least in the short term. I’ve got the right people talking with the local government about something more permanent,” Tony reported. “I found a dozen more bodies today, no new survivors... After this is over I’m out. I had FRIDAY send notification to your email. Don’t worry about a going away party, I can read the mood of a room.”

“You’re resigning?” Steve asked in surprise.

“I’m older than Barton, call it retiring,” Tony said with a shrug. “Oh don’t worry, I’m not pulling funding- Hell, I’m building you a shiny new compound. Did I tell you about that yet? I’m running on three hours per twenty-four, I can’t remember what I’ve said out loud and what I’ve just thought about. Anyway, the Compound, it’s totally unassociated with me. Well, okay, the plan’s actually extensively remodeling an old Stark Industries warehouse, speeds up a lot of things when I already own the property but it’s been gathering dust since Dad’s time. It’s not like the Tower, even the neighbors probably don’t remember who’s name is on lease. It’ll be the Avengers’, a clean new start for a new team. Of course, I’d be insulted if you went for anyone else for gear but… Like I said, I’m out. Too much bad mojo.”

Steve felt sickening twist in his gut and recognized it as guilt.

_Novi Grad fell, Steve barely made the leap to the troop-carrier’s deck. On the comms Tony was shouting instructions to Thor, trying to finalize their solution even as the city fell. For the next fifty seconds Steve had a clear and horrifying vision of the city striking the Earth with an explosive force that would dwarf a dozen nuclear warheads, sending enough ash and debris into the stratosphere to trigger another ice age. Hundreds of millions dying. All because he made the wrong call._

_“ I asked for a solution not an escape plan.” He hadn’t had any notion that Fury had something like the Helicarrier in his back-pocket. He hadn’t any alternative to offer. Steve would have liked to say he’d rejected Tony’s plan based on blind optimism that something would turn up but… He’d been so angry at Tony, “Not one person left on this rock.” Setting impossible conditions for victory, for redemption. Offering nothing, demanding solutions that didn’t exist, as if all it took to reshape reality was to push hard enough on the people beneath him, to push Tony hard enough._

_For fifty seconds Novi Grad fell and Steve watched in horror, in his determination have Tony save everyone he’d doomed them all. “Now!” Tony shouted. The lightning brewing over the city poured down on the church at Thor’s call. Over-charged between Tony’s repulsor blasts from below and Thor’s lightning strikes from above the vibranium core exploded, pulverizing the city. Rocks rained from the sky for hundreds of miles around but none so large as to endanger the world. Steve breathed a sigh of relief. “Tony, Thor, good work,” he said. Empty air answered him._

_“Work’s not done,” Fury broke into the channel. “Anyone who got some fight left in them, there are people dying down there. Get on it.” Steve and Natasha shared a tired look and answered the call. Vision joined them a few minutes later and began helping locate those injured in the debris fall. Then Thor came, soaked to the skin and looking bedraggled but whole._

_Steve saw War Machine digging civilians out of a collapsed building over ten miles from the crater. Even so, every few minutes Rhodes sent out a message, “Come on Tony answer me. This is no time for radio silence. Tell me where you are,” but there was no reply and Rhodes was too disciplined to turn his back on the people dying in front of him to go searching for his friend. “Come on Tones, talk to me.” Steve was starting to fear that there never would be an answer to Rhodes’ pleas. His relief at having stopped Ultron was tainted by thoughts of returning to the Tower, Tony’s workshop dark and quiet beneath them. Returning to plan a funeral instead of a team dinner._

_Then Hill called, “I just heard from Potts, Stark contacted her-” Steve held his breath not knowing yet if he could let himself be relieved. During the Chitauri Invasion Tony had tried to contact Pepper as well, to say goodbye. “He wanted her to mobilize the September Foundation to help Sokovia rebuild. Potts says he sounded concussed. We got coordinates from the transmission, it’s barely a mile from your current position.”_

_Steve took off running. He found Tony sitting on the ground beside the badly battered suit of armor, his head leaned back against the dented, empty helmet. His face was bruised. “We’ll need to pick a new site for rebuilding, so send some surveyors- Oh, right, priorities, that’s phase two at least. First food and, um, stuff.” Absently Tony reached up and wiped blood away from the corner of his mouth, whether it was evidence of a bitten tongue or internal bleeding Steve couldn’t have said. Tony blinked at the red on his fingers in puzzlement for a moment before dismissing it and assuming an expression of confidence. “What? Pepper, come on, I’m fine- Like always. Stop worrying.” He sighed, “Fine. Rhodey’s first overseas posting was Korea. You’re allergic to strawberries. DUM-E came online November first, 1988-” Tony broke off for a moment then whined, “Pepper! One year off, that’s good for me. And anyone could confuse Korea and Djibouti.”_

His teammates had all survived but Steve felt like was standing vigil over the Avengers’ last gasps. Bruce had fled. Thor was talking about needing to get back to Asgard. Clint was reminding them that he’d promised his wife that he’d retire after this. And now Tony giving notice. Tony, who was already backing away from him, fiddling restlessly with his phone. Steve wanted to tell himself that Tony had tried quitting before and it hadn’t stuck but his heart told him that the Avengers would be over if he let Tony walk away like this.

His anger had dissipated in the hour where Tony had been missing and in it’s wake, Steve had several uncomfortable realizations. He remembered growling _“Sometimes my teammates don’t tell me things,”_ and a log splintering under his fingers. Before the serum, Steve knew he would have loathed, on principal, anyone who tried to use their physical strength to intimidate like that. Even beyond that he couldn’t tell himself that the Avengers had been founded on a bedrock of honesty and openness. Tony hadn’t talked to them about his plans but Steve knew he’d kept plans of his own from Tony.

_“Tony’s parents,” Steve said looking up from the file in horror._

_“I warned you that you wouldn’t like what I’d found,” Natasha said._

_“I- I should be the one to tell him. Tell Tony. It- I think- It should come from me,” Steve stammered._

_Natasha eyed him dubiously. “Stark won’t take it well, he’s volatile, impulsive. Is this really a can of worms you want to open?”_

_“HYDRA murdered Howard and his wife, Tony has to be told that,” Steve said._

_Natasha sighed, “I suppose you’re right. But YOU telling him? Why?”_

_“I’m- I knew Howard. Knew Bucky! I can make him-”_

_“What? Understand?” Natasha interrupted. “He’s going to be angry, hurt, emotional and YOUR best friend is the one in the line of fire. Without Stark’s funds the Avengers are dead in the water. He is going to be furious, with the Winter Soldier, with Barnes. It’s the natural reaction… And if you get defensive on BUCKY'S behalf? It’s only going to make it worse, make us all the enemy.” She stepped back and sighed, “Steve, you can’t walk in insisting that he understand that it wasn’t Bucky, it won’t help anything… I’ll talk to him. Trust me to take care of it.” Natasha smiled a bit, “I’ll make sure he doesn’t act against Barnes and that he doesn’t abandon the Avengers. That’s what’s important: What he does, not how he feels.”_

_A few days later she came back with Clint and the Quinjet. “Tony’s okay with helping us?” Steve asked hopefully._

_“He understands what’s important,” Natasha assured him. “Just… Don’t bring it up.”_

Natasha might have told Tony about his parent’s murder but even without being present for the conversation Steve knew she’d couched their search for Bucky in terms of keeping the Winter Soldier out of HYDRA’s hands. None of them had been talking about the elephant in the room: About what was going to happen when they found Bucky and brought him home. Steve knew he wouldn’t accept anything less than every effort being put forth to help Bucky overcome the damage HYDRA had done to him. After seventy years of suffering as a POW Bucky deserved it.

But at the same time Steve didn’t feel right about asking Tony to be the one supplying that effort or the funds for it. Even if the cost of housing Bucky would be a pittance next to what Tony had already paid funding their search asking Tony to open his home to Bucky? Just the thought of that conversation was enough to make Steve cringe. He had thought about offering to move out of the Tower to take care of Bucky. SI was paying the Avengers’ salaries, officially they were part of the security department. Even if he left, technically, Tony would still be paying to house Bucky but it didn’t feel like the same degree of imposition. The only problem was his response time in an emergency but they’d figure something out. Still, even with most of a solution in hand Steve hadn’t found the words, in over a year, to bring up the subject of where Bucky would stay once they found him.... Well, that and what would happen once Bucky felt ready to join the Avengers. For months Steve had been letting those necessary conversations fester in silence. _‘And then I expect complete openness from Tony when I’ve been anything but. Physically threatened him for not giving it to me.’_

“Well, good talk Cap. Let me know if there’s anything you need.” And then Tony walked away and Steve was standing there staring after him with everything he needed to say left unsaid again.

 _‘Next time,’_ Steve promised himself.

“Steve!” Sam exclaimed rushing up. “You’re not going to believe who I saw helping to dig out a collapsed building.”

**_‘It wasn’t Bucky. It wasn’t even really Sam,’_ Steve thought.**

_**‘I had so many plans. Bruce said we were more like a time bomb than a team. I’d finally seen that he was right and I wanted to fix it. Whatever happened with Tony we needed to support him, like the team we should have been before Ultron...** _

_**‘...We were always two teams and I never saw it. I went to Sam, Natasha and Clint for help with Bucky. Tony went to Bruce, Rhodey and Dr. Cho for help with Extremis, saving the President, stabilizing it for Pepper. Then Bruce and Tony build that Veronica thing without the rest of us; I never had a clue how worried Bruce really was about losing control. Thor kept to himself mostly, I still don’t know what might be going on with him. And Ultron, always Ultron...** _

_**‘The first step to fixing the team was to actually be a team. To stand by Tony and offer some support, instead of setting him up to fail like I’d been doing during the Battle of Sokovia. But I never got the chance.’** _

**Steve stretched out a hand and fumbled for the washcloth Sam had tossed him. Sitting up made his head spin. For several moments he leaned his forehead against his knees and willed his stomach to settle. Then he started gingerly washing the blood off his face.**

_**‘When the Avengers reassembled after the fall of S.H.I.E.L.D. one of the first things we decided was that Tony, Bruce and Thor didn’t need to know that Fury was alive. They weren’t military, they didn’t have the training Natasha, Clint, Sam and I had, it was for the best if they weren’t trusted with such sensitive information. Then we’re surprised, outraged, when Tony and Bruce decide that the rest of us aren’t scientists or engineers and we don’t need to know what they’re working on in their labs.** _

_**‘And on top of everything, the situation with Bucky. I just kept hoping that something, no idea what, would come up and I wouldn’t have to talk to Tony about Bucky staying with us or being part of the team. The situation wasn’t fair, not to either of them and instead of dealing with it head on, I just put it off. I took the easy way out.’** _

**Steve stood up slowly, bracing one hand against the wall he made his way over to the sink and it’s heavily padded faucet. He blinked at it in confusion, then the memories came.**

There was a whoosh and the pipe-sized dumbwaiter in the corner of the cell slid open. Sam retrieved the first shake and passed it over to Steve. Several seconds later a second shake arrived in the same way, “Cheers,” Sam said raising the clear plastic bottle wryly.

Steve grimaced and, after a moment, started chugging his shake.

“It’s not so bad,” Sam said as he drank his. “I mean, it could have taste. They’re aliens it would probably be worse if they actually made it taste like something.”

A third shake arrived and Steve retrieved it at the same time as he sent the first container back to where ever the pipe took them.

“Drink up, then we’ll get back to Sam Wilson’s Most Excellent History Class,” Sam said. “We’re up to the Iran Hostage Crisis.”

Steve eyed his second shake, “They know enough about us to know I need more food than you. We’ve been here long enough for rickets or scurvy to develop if the shakes were just simple calories, but we’re fine. They’re giving us everything we need to stay healthy.”

“I could use some fresh air and enough room for a real jog instead of hours of pacing,” Sam said. “And not to disparage the current company, it would really do us both good to talk to someone else even for just a few minutes.”

“They’re making an effort to keep us alive,” Steve said shaking his head. “Which means that they need us alive. I’m pretty sure they knock us out about once a month… To get whatever it is they need.”

Sam looked a little grey, “Come on man, I’m not the scratching marks in the wall type, not when there’s no end to count down to.”

“The two of us have been trying to escape for over a year now and we haven’t even laid a hand on our captures. We don’t even see them,” Steve persisted.

Sam’s mouth compressed into a line, unconsciously he backed away from Steve.

“They’ve had us for over a year, they’ve had people on Earth posing as us for over a year, doing God knows what sort of damage with our faces, positions,” Steve said firmly. “They need us alive for some reason. They don’t interrogate us, they took our memories right off so there was never a need. I think they must need us alive to keep imitating us. It’s our duty not to cooperate, not to give them what they need to hurt our people.”

“You can’t just give up, we’ll think of something,” Sam protested.

Steve shook his head. He set his shake aside and walked over to the sink. For several minutes he eyed the faucet grimly. “I’m guessing they can do more damage with my identity than yours. Good luck Sam, I hope you make it back to Earth,” Steve said. Then he gripped the sink with both hands and slammed himself forward with all the strength he could muster, smashing his face into the protruding metal of the faucet.

**Obviously it hadn’t worked and the newly padded cell meant trying again would be harder. “There’s alway hunger strikes,” Steve said as he hung the rag over the edge of the sink. “They’ll probably just figure out a way to force feed me but I feel like I have to do something.”**

**An explosion shook the room. “Hold that thought,” Sam said. “This may be our shot, finally.”**

**Steve nodded. He stalked over to the door, his expression determined.**

**The door slid open, Steve threw a punch, putting his whole body weight and enhanced strength into it. A slight, blond woman flanked by several blue aliens caught his hand with a small grunt of effort. “We’d heard rumors that the Skrull were making a move on Terra, but if you’re who I think you are, and the history books are wrong about you crashing into the North Atlantic…”**

**“Who are you?” Sam exclaimed.**

**“Major Carol Danvers, US Air Force,” the woman said. “Or that’s who I was a couple decades ago, roughly. Cryo ships really screw with a person’s sense of time.”**

 

* * *

 

“We’re too late,” the Kree commander said as they watched Earth’s Sorcerer Supreme fall. As Thanos claim the Time Stone and completed the Infinity Gauntlet.

“No!” Steve exclaimed. Nervously Sam shifted closer to him in case the Kree didn’t react well. After nearly three years as prisoners of the Skrull Empire they were wary of aliens, even if these aliens had rescued them… And then declared Earth too far out of their way to bring them home until word spread that Thanos had successfully claimed both the Power Stone and the Reality Stone. That Thanos and the whole Black Order were marching on Earth to claim the remaining Infinity Stones.

“Well, at least we get to die fighting instead of snuffed out like candles from a wind a galaxy away,” Danvers announced fatalistically but with a grin.

The Kree met her declaration with answering grins. The youngest of the team pumped his fist in the air. “Let’s make him bleed!” he exclaimed.

“That’s the spirit,” Danvers said.

“Can’t let Terrans have all the fun,” one of the other Kree said with a nod toward the battle. “They’re more impressive than I expected. Looks like you aren’t one of kind after all Danvers, it’s your whole race that just doesn’t know when to quit. ”

The Sorcerer's Sanctum had fallen. Thanos had completed the gauntlet. That should have been the end of everything but the Hulk led a charge against Thanos along with a number of other heavy brawlers. When the Mad Titan swatted them down mid-ranged heavy-hitters like Iron Man and Thor let loose until the brawlers could regain their feet. They were supported by two snipers of sufficient skill to keep peppering Thanos’ face with lighter shot when the brawlers where close and massive explosions when their allies had been momentarily pushed back.

Steve wasn’t quite sure what he was seeing but various segments of Thanos’ armor would suddenly constrict to nothing, ripping themselves apart around his body, pebbles beneath his feet would grow to boulders and throw off his balance.

A slim youth covered from head to foot in blue and red, a powerful black man in a ripped tee shirt, a green woman and another woman in armor that reminded Steve of Thor’s stepped in to fill the gap when the Hulk was knocked unconscious. Vines shot from the hands of a walking sapling and entangled Thanos only to be ripped apart. Sam gasped as the other Falcon was swatted out of the air. A flaming arrow shattered against the Titan’s eye. Earth had not and would not surrender. Despite having completed the Infinity Gauntlet, Thanos wasn’t being given even a second of reprieve to gather the concentration needed to use it.

Danvers raised her fist in the air and with a shout that was quickly picked up by the Kree, Steve Rogers and Sam Wilson, she charged into the battle.

It was a battle of madness and desperation, never letting up for a second. Friends and allies fell and others instantly stepped up to take their place. There were moments when lighter street-fighters like Daredevil and Colleen Wing went toe to toe with Thanos with their only hope being to buy a few seconds for their more powerful compatriots to rejoin the fight.

And then a third sniper fired, the bullet skimmed up Thanos’ arm, burrowing under the gauntlet in the moment before it exploded. For a moment the Infinity Gauntlet was transformed into a primitive rocket. The massive explosion inside the Gauntlet ripped it off of Thanos’ hand and sent it spinning away.

Iron Man plucked the completed Gauntlet out of the air as it flew past. He put it on.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whelp, there goes Natasha under the bus. 
> 
> Both Steve and Natasha knew or at least strongly suspected that Bucky was used to kill Tony’s parents. I’ve seen a number of stories where the two of them decide that Steve should be the one to tell Tony… Then he doesn’t, which leaves Natasha clear of responsibility. 
> 
> For the hell of it, I decided why not go with the opposite scenario: Natasha was the one who was supposed to tell Tony. Steve’s the one who wrongly believes that Tony knows at least the basics. Steve lying has a lot more emotional impact because he’s supposed to be better than that. Natasha deciding that Tony’s emotional reaction would be inconvenient to their goals and thus hiding the information from him is just a lying liar who lies. Still wrong but not shocking. A betrayal but only from someone who’s known upfront to be untrustworthy.


	4. Agency

**“I despair of the human race,” Dr. Helen Cho announced as she walked into the hall where Barnes and several of the Avengers were waiting.**

**“Is it Steve Rogers?” Barnes demanded gruffly.**

**For a moment everyone blinked at him, surprised that he had taken the lead. Then Dr. Cho collected herself. “I opted for something a little less extreme than the Kree commander’s suggestion of cutting a toe off; I took a blood sample from both Sam Wilsons. The sample from the Wilson who turned up with the Kree remained human. Roughly two minutes after the sample was taken from the Wilson who has been with the Avengers it metamorphosed into something I’d never seen before. I think it’s safe to say that the Kree assertion that Skrulls can’t maintain control over the form of severed body-parts extends to blood. The Wilson who arrived with the Kree is an unEnhanced, human male. Dental and Medical records confirm that he is Sam Wilson.**

**“The blood of the individual claiming to be Steve Rogers doesn’t change when removed from his body. Due to various bouts of paranoia about the Super Soldier Serum falling into the wrong hands there are no surviving medical records for Steve Rogers, post-Serum, and with his Enhancements? Well, frankly the DNA of the person our custody has more in common with Thor’s than with that of an unEnhanced human. What I can tell you is that he is not a Skrull and he has antibodies for damn near every last disease that was going around the Eastern Seaboard in the 1930’s.”**

**“Antibodies?” Barnes asked.**

**“The body remembers the diseases it survives,” Dr. Cho explained. “Steve Rogers might have been in exceedingly poor health before receiving the serum but he had survived so many of the diseases that the plagued the people of your day... The Serum amplifies everything that is in the recipient. Steve Roger’s immune system was already primed for so many illness and the Serum supercharged it. His blood could have been used to accelerate the development of a number of vaccines by decades… And the world used him for a weapon and a propaganda piece. As I said, I despair of humanity.”**

**“So you’re saying it’s really Steve?” Barnes checked.**

**“It is extremely likely that he is Steve Rogers,” Dr. Cho qualified. “Or at least that he came in contact with most of the illnesses that Steve Rogers is reported to have had before receiving the serum.”**

**“Do you want to see him?” Hope asked Barnes.**

**He hesitated.**

A week earlier.

Barnes stared down at the alien wearing Captain America’s uniform, at the gaping hole in it’s abdomen. “It was Stevie?” He shook his head, “I mean-”

Natasha nodded, “I was following what I thought was Steve. Then Stark shot him and he turned into this.”

“When?” Barnes asked.

“Stark says it replaced the real Steve Rogers after the second Battle of Sokovia,” Natasha replied stiffly.

Barnes wondered in a vaguely detached way if she didn’t believe Stark or if it just rankled that she hadn’t spotted the imposter herself. He thought about the last few years, since Steve- since this thing caught up with him in Bucharest. “Who’s running the show now?”

Natasha gaped at him for split second. “Stark, I suppose. He assumed command after revealing this,” she nodded toward the body. “We’re certain he’s not one of them, it’s more than we can say of anyone else.”

Barnes grimaced. In Siberia, after all the running and fighting of the days leading up to it, when he’d seen Stevie go flying he’d acted on instincts born in dozens if not hundreds of Brooklyn back alleys and honed in the European Theatre and he jumped to Steve’s defense. Later, much later when he’d had time to digest the whole disaster, Barnes had decked Steve -what he’d thought was Steve- himself. For lack of any other options he’d come back to the States along with the rest of the Rogues but Barnes couldn’t how it was anything but sick and wrong to make Stark, make anyone, house the person who murdered their parents, no matter what the qualifiers were. So he’d done what he could to not rub his presence in Stark’s home in the man’s face. Having been a ghost story for seventy years, Barnes was good at making himself unnoticed. “Someone must hate me,” he muttered.

“I need to talk to Stark,” he told Natasha. He looked at the dead alien and shuttered. HYDRA’s trigger words had been a mace, a brutal, forthright assault on his personhood. The Skrull was a stiletto slipping between the ribs smoothly and painlessly, killing his autonomy silently, with nostalgia and misplaced trust. “He needs to know ‘bout the stuff Stevie- that thing had me doing. Get Wanda, she might remember names I forgot.”

**Wanda had been gone by the time they went looking for her, never to darken the Avengers’ halls again.**

Barnes stood at attention in the center of Stark’s office, staring into the middle distance rather than making eye contact. “The alien would give the Witch and I missions. Said it was about crooked politicians with agendas trying to get their hooks into the Accords. Said we had to stop ‘em or the Accords’d become what we feared. My job was to get the Witch past their security so she could do her bit. Make ‘em forget their Agenda, ‘s what Stevie said. But it wasn’t Steve and now I got my doubt about what Wanda and I were really setting ‘em up for.”

“I bet,” Stark huffed. “Make a list of everyone the two of you compromised. Give it to FRIDAY, her system’ll set it to distribute once Thanos falls. We don’t have time to be looking cross-eyed at each other, let alone to be rooting out imposters, right now. But we can’t risk losing the info if you don’t make it either.”

Barnes’ gaze snapped to Stark. “You outed the one that replaced Stevie.” He saw Stark’s eyes flicker up and away and knew whatever he said it would be prevarication.

“Didn’t know I’d get another chance,” Stark said. “Didn’t know he was going to change back.” Then his expression closed over as he remembered that he owed Barnes nothing. “We’ve got plans to lay. Chop, chop. Ebony Maw was just the opening act.” And Barnes wondered what his real reason had been.

**Thanos allowed several days to pass, most likely to give the fear of him time to build. “Moron,” Scott had scoffed. “Like we’re going to do anything but use the time to get ready.” And Barnes agree in theory but he also worried that Thanos didn’t appear to care what sort of reception they might arrange for him.**

**Just short of a week after Stark killed Ebony Maw and revealed the fake Steve Rogers the rest of Thanos’ Black Order came for the last of the Infinity Stones: The Time Stone.**

As the battle progressed Barnes felt another sniper’s sites focus on him more than once. He scowled, _‘Gonna have things out with Barton once this is over.... Long as we win. Yuck better do his job.’_ They’d agreed that Barton would take the first shot at Thanos, the archer had a feel for weak spots that ought to classify as a superpower… But no matter how good he was, crossbow bolts didn’t have the speed of a bullet and in the middle of a battlefield the bang of gun going off was nothing more than background noise.

There was a part of Barnes, he classified it as ‘Bucky’ even though the history books told him that Sgt. Bucky Barnes had been a sniper too, that hated how easy it was for him to fall into the proper mindset, patient and hyper-alter. He let the battle raging in front of him become a thing of secondary import, it was a potential disruption to his mission, it wasn’t his mission. There were people he lived with, his friends and allies, putting their lives on the line as he watched from the shadows but it wasn’t his job to rush out and save them. He wasn’t there to be the team’s older brother. They didn’t need a protector, they needed to know that when the Big Cheese took the field that he’d be ready to take Thanos down… If it was humanly possible.

Barton was an annoyance, he kept tripping Barnes’ threat awareness. _‘Like to put a bullet into the eye of that gargoyle he’s using as camouflage but that’d give away my position,’_ Barnes groused to himself. _‘Deal. S’not like the Soldier didn’t have handlers who registered as enough of a threat to be a distraction even during missions.’_

Then it happened. Thanos made his move, killed the last of his Order as if she were so much trash and challenged them all with a look in his eyes that said they were nothing more than insects to him. Barton ended up having his shit together after all and got a clean hit on the base of the Titan’s skull with one of Stark’s special pay-loads. The explosion was suitably impressive but Thanos shrugged it off and the real battle started.

Barton and Castle switched to lighter payloads to avoid hurting their own people and went for face shots, trying to blind or distract Thanos if they couldn’t kill him. Unidentifiable stuff ran out of Thanos’ ears as if he were a noodle machine, Barnes figured it was the Ant and Wasp expanding shit inside his ear canals but it was no more than an annoyance to the Mad Titan.

Thanos was an unstoppable force marching on the New York Sanctum and the last Infinity Stone. His army abandoned the field when he arrived, fleeing back to their ships where they cowered in fear of the being who commanded them.

Shuri led the Wakandan equipped and controlled Iron Legionnaires to form a shield barrier around Thanos while Rhodes took War Machine and his division of Legion into the air to rain down hell on Thanos in hopes that the contained force would prove to be enough to obliterate him. Barton, using his ability to loft arrows in a way a bullet couldn’t be controlled, arched his shots over the Wakandan barrier, emptying his quiver of Stark’s special arrows into the maelstrom around Thanos. A high pitched whine screamed across the battlefield until finally the force inside the barrier was more than the barrier could withstand as later explosions acted as a cap to push the earlier ones down. The Wakandan shields glowed red-hot then exploded taking out almost all of the Wakandan Legionnaires and half of Rhodes’s air force.

Thanos shrugged off a thick coating of ash and pressed forward until he was at the steps of the Sanctum. He ripped open the front wall and a horde of demons flooded out of the hole, out of hell. Thanos sneered and flexed his gloved hand. The Gauntlet glowed red and the demons wavered like a heat mirage and then they were gone and the Sorcerer Supreme stood in the gaping hole in his Sanctum, glaring defiantly. The stone hanging around Strange’s neck unleashed a wave of green power. Thanos knocked it away with a blast of purple from the gauntlet.

Iron Man dove between Strange and Thanos, discharging his Unibeam into the Titans’ face from point blank range. Thanos grabbed Iron Man’s helmet, his fingers denting the titanium alloy and threw him clean through a nearby skyscraper. Strange moved his hand in a circle, preparing to run. Thanos crushed the incipient portal with a blue fist. Then he grabbed Strange by the neck and shook him roughly. The Sorcerer Supreme went limp. As Thanos reached for the Time Stone Castle took a shot at the still empty socket on the gauntlet with one of Stark’s special bullets. Barnes heard several outraged shouts over the comms as the massive explosion engulfed both Thanos and Strange but he didn’t know what they were complaining about; Trying to damage the gauntlet was a good thought and the sorcerer was already dead, his neck broken.

A new spaceship landed but most of the fighters were too stunned to notice, their eyes were fixed on Thanos as he smashed the Eye of Agamotto, retrieved the Time Stone and completed the Infinity Gauntlet.

“Don’t let up!” Iron Man shouted as he yanked himself out of the rumble of the skyscraper and ripped off the mangled remains of his helmet. “If he uses the Gauntlet it’s game over!” The Hulk was the first to rally in response to Iron Man’s call. He charged Thanos with a infuriated roar. A half dozen other bruisers fell in behind the green behemoth.

Barnes noted with approval when the Guardian with the Yaka Arrow waited until Thanos was distracted by his helmet shrinking around his head. They weren’t so lucky as to have it crush his skull but when the helmet popped the Yaka Arrow was a flaming missile an inch from the Titan’s eye. The arrow shattered on impact but it had been a good plan. Judging from Thanos’ left eye failing to tear, even when covered in a film of soot from the explosion they had created a blind spot and on the side with the Infinity Gauntlet no less.

The spaceship’s gangplank lowered and Barnes froze in shock as Steve Rogers charged into the battle behind a small blonde along with a second Sam Wilson and a dozen blue aliens. _‘Is that really Stevie?’_ Barnes wondered. He jerked his mind back to the battle, _‘Would’ve just earned a long session in the chair losing focus like that, if I were still the Soldier,’_ he couldn’t help but think. _‘Just- It’s Stevie, walking off a spaceship! Not dead in some unmarked grave… Thought the last one was Stevie too.’_

 

* * *

 

_“‘Member the start of school when we were thirteen?” Stevie asked._

_“I ‘member pulling your punk ass out of the river,” Barnes huffed. “Did I forget or did ya never tell me what got those guys so riled? Most folks were happy beating the shit out of ya, they tried to drown ya.”_

_Steve shrugged, “Eh, you know: They were bullies.”_

_“‘Cording to you Hitler was a bully and so was Arnie down the street,” Barnes replied, unimpressed._

_“He shoved Becca in the mud. She was wearing her Sunday dress too,” Steve said._

_Barnes rolled his eyes. “All three of us ended up doing penance for showing up to Church straight from a fight.”_

_“At least it was Arnie’s bloody nose that made a mess of you,” Steve said with a small grin._

_“Always having to pull your ass outta one mess or another,” Barnes groused._

_“Ain’t nothing changed,” Steve said. “I still need you on my six Bucky.”_

_“I’ve been getting more of my memories back but I got a hell of a lot of memories from what I did as HYDRA’s Fist. I ain’t who you ‘member,” Barnes warned._

 

* * *

 

 

_“It wasn’t your fault Bucky, none of it.”_ It rang as false as a cracked bell every time Stevie said it but Barnes went with him anyway. But it wasn’t just for ninety-seven pound chihuahua who’d always gone after bulldogs that Barnes left Wakanda almost immediately after Princess Shuri figured out removing HYDRA’s triggers. Still telling people that Stevie needed him was the path of least resistance, Barnes suspected Stark’s answer for why he’d outed the fake-Steve was the same sort of untruth. The reality was a tangle that Barnes couldn’t adequately express in his own head let alone to anyone else.

Bucharest and Siberia had shown Barnes that even without being triggered he could become a danger to everyone around him on the flip of a dime, that he couldn’t trust himself to make the right call about who to hurt and how much. The last person he wanted to hurt was Princess Shuri of Wakanda. He in awe of her, both for her genius and the amazing generosity she’d shown using her time and resources to free him of HYDRA’s triggers. And as much as he was afraid of being a physical threat to her and her people that was the least of his fears.

Shuri was bright and bubbly, full of hope for the future. She was proof that some things were universal, unchanged by class, culture or even time; when Barnes watched the princess giving her older brother hell he saw Rebecca, his little sister in her. Shuri still believed that humans were inherently good and Barnes would have cheerfully swallowed broken glass before he’d be the one to take that away from her. He couldn’t tell her that, sometimes, when he looked at the kids who hung around, who looked at him being somewhere between a playmate and an exotic pet, that sometimes when he looked at them he remembered killing kids even younger and it made him want to gut himself.

Despite the loss of her father and the recent unrest in Wakanda, Shuri was still young enough to think that she was invincible. She was used to being able to do anything she set her mind to, Barnes didn’t want to be the one to tell her that he wasn’t as easy to fix as one of her machines. He didn’t want her to know how far from human that a person could fall, but as ‘Bucky’s’ memories returned it made it harder to keep the damage hidden. In Siberia he’d remembered Target: Howard Stark. He’d remembered shooting out the car’s tire and irritation that his handler hadn’t warned him about the traffic camera, because it was him that got ‘retrained’- _Screaming, blood, pain, so much pain._ -when a mission failed. He remembered smashing in Howard’s skull and strangling his wife because he had orders not to leave any bullet holes in the bodies and it had been nothing more than a mission parameter. He hadn’t had the capability to think about it in terms of his victims’ fear and suffering. Now, with his memories getting clearer everyday Barnes remembered drinking and laughing with Howard back in the war. He understood the fear in Maria Stark’s voice as she called for her husband. He remembered that Howard had been the one who risked his own life flying Stevie in to rescue him from Azzano. He understood that killing Howard had been a betrayal of a comrade in arms. As Barnes got closer to reclaiming his humanity, as the Winter Soldier’s ‘targets’ resolved into people, it ripped the bandage of a mind too fried to care or even recognize his targets as his fellow men, off his past and left him bleeding.

Stevie, with his endless _“To the end of the line, Bucky.”_ and _“It wasn’t your fault, Bucky.”_ had seemed safer than the brilliant and idealistic princess... Even if Stevie’s denials made Barnes want shove the broken, ugly parts of himself into his old friend’s face until Steve finally saw the person standing in front of him today.

 

* * *

 

 

_“She was a kid, fifteen at the oldest. Her father was gonna recommend a candidate for a political appointment and HYDRA had a plant in among ‘em. They sent me to take the girl, leverage. My handler called her father, had me break a few fingers while her pa listened to her scream. Once he’d made the recommendation they wanted they told him where he could pick up his little girl._

_“He probably let himself believe that he could report what had happened as soon as he had her back safe. He had an accident on the way to pick her up, pretty much the same accident that Howard had. To make it neat I put the girl in the car with him. Then I set it on fire, I wasn’t told to kill her first, so I didn’t._

_The fire was needed to cover up the fun my handler had with the girl while we were waiting to murder her pa. I can remember it happening five feet from me but I didn’t do anything, I had a mission: Crash her pa’s car when he came to rescue her. It was sloppy, unprofessional, I can remember being annoyed because I knew if anything went wrong with the mission I’d be the one screaming for it afterwards, not the disgusting fuck thinking with his dick… Shuri was terrorizing T’Challa again, being the pain-in-the-butt little sister that they all are and it hit me: That girl, the one I let get raped before I murdered her, she looked like ‘Becca.”_

_Barnes waited for Steve to react, to be horrified. Steve’s expression never flickered. “It wasn’t you. Other people might not get that but I know you, the real you. It doesn’t matter what HYDRA made you do it wasn’t you,” he said reaching out to rub the back of Barnes’ neck._

 

* * *

 

Stevie was willfully blind to the damage, he was relentless and unfaltering in disassociated it from Barnes. And sometimes Barnes found it was tempting to play along, to pretend that more than half the memories filling his head had nothing to do with him. _‘‘Sides if I ever did snap, Captain America capable of defending himself. Only it wasn’t Stevie. That thing saw the damage in me and used it, used ME as surely as HYDRA did.’_

Barnes looked at the new spaceship, at the new Steve Rogers and his friends. _‘What if that ain’t Stevie either? ...Doesn’t matter. Thanos first, EVERYTHING else after. Stark was right about that.’_

Maybe-Steve and his new friends were fresh and strong. The Hulk was the only bruiser still climbing back to his feet of the original Earth Force, Maybe-Steve and his allies helped fill a gap that had opened in their forces. But they weren’t turning the tide, only staving off the end.

Barnes focused on his target. He thought about Barton and his near infallible intuition failing to find a weak point on Thanos. He thought about Castle going for the Gauntlet. He thought about Shuri and and Rhodes’ scheme to contain a massive blast and force all the energy back in on Thanos. Barnes took a deep breath, he wasn’t Barton but he was no slouch as a sniper either. Still this would be the shot of a lifetime- If he made it. Thanos was indestructible. The Infinity Gauntlet was impervious to harm. Energy had to go somewhere. What happened when an unstoppable force hit and immovable object?

Thanos raised his hand, pointing the Gauntlet at Iron Man.

For Barnes the world narrowed down to the crease in Thanos’ forearm, the dark shadow where the dip in his muscles created a gap between his arm and the rim of the Infinity Gauntlet. Barnes exhaled and pulled the trigger. The bullet skimmed along Thanos’ arm and lodged deep in that crevasse and then it exploded. All the force that Tony Stark at his most desperate could pack into an shell casing going off between Thanos’ invulnerable arm and the unbreakable shell of the Infinity Gauntlet. All that force had to go somewhere. It ripped the Gauntlet off Thanos’ arm and sent it flying- Straight into Tony Stark’s hands.

“No!” Thanos shouted as Stark put the gauntlet on. The Hulk, eyes filled with unquenchable hate, larger and angrier than ever before grabbed Thanos and yanked him back. “Leave Tinman alone!” he snarled.

With Stark’s quicksilver mind it didn’t take him long to activate the gauntlet. He stared at Thanos, a cold smile turning up his lips, “Get out of my face.” And the monster that Earth’s Mightiest had been breaking themselves against ripped apart, shattering into nearly invisible shards like the frailest of china.

**Barnes hesitated as he glanced from Wasp to Dr. Cho. Then he shook his head. “I don’t want to see him. It’s- It’s too soon.”**

**No one said anything. Barnes figured _‘It’s too soon’_ was a damn near universal feeling. The battle against Thanos had been intense and the end so sudden- They were still trying to get a grasp on what Stark had done, considering the the ramifications were beyond anyone’s scope yet. And on top of that there were the Skrull.**

The gauntlet, all six Infinity Stones, glowing as Stark turned, slowly taking in the battlefield, the bombed out buildings, the fallen heroes. “I’m a mechanic aren’t I? Time to fix a few things.” Stark raised his hands, floating in the air and Barnes couldn’t have said if it was Stark spinning or the world turning around him. All six of the Stones lit up. Buildings repaired themselves, so did people. The battle’s casualties rose from the ground, their injuries repairing themselves.

It didn’t stop with the damage dealt by Thanos. Barnes gasped as his Wakandan-made arm dissolved then reformed into flesh and blood. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the ghosts of violence, of battles months, years past. Saw the ghosts made flesh, given life again, saw their eyes full of the knowledge of what had been. Whatever Stark was doing he wasn’t turning back the clock. Barnes wondered if it was just New York, he knew it wasn’t. The feel in the air was too much. The glow of the gauntlet had spread, it shone in Stark’s eyes, beneath his skin. Barnes didn’t know how far Stark’s desire to fix things extended but he knew Thanos wasn’t the beginning or the end of it; his arm was proof of that.

“Ultimate power in TONY STARK's hands, tell me I’m not the only one worried,” the Falcon said over an open comm line. Since the Falcon had a comm Barnes assumed it wasn’t the Sam Wilson who had shown up with Steve and the new aliens, _‘That guy always rubbed me wrong.’_

“Better him than an alien fucker like you,” he shot back but the damage had already been done. From his vantage point Barnes saw more than a few weapons being re-aimed at Stark.

Barnes drew a bead on Barton’s position. He figured that if anyone was going to take the shot it would be the hotheaded archer. He was almost disappointed to see that Barton’s arm hung at his side, without an arrow notched let alone aimed. _‘After the shit he’d been pulling earlier, I wouldn’t have minded the excuse.’_ Barnes keyed his comm again. “Stark, think you could show us the rest of the shapeshifters?” he suggested. But if Stark was aware of anything going on around him it didn’t show.

Then two of the Guardians, the shy girl with antennas and the human, walked up to Stark. Quill boosted the girl up on his shoulders. “You have done enough,” the girl said as she reached out to lay her hand against Stark’s cheek. “You can rest.”

Stark shook his head. “Never enough. Never GOOD enough,” He laughed bitterly, “Just ask around.”

“No, there would be sadness if you burned yourself out.” Tears welled up in the girl’s eyes. “You know already that there are things that can’t be fixed.”

“Just know MYSELF well enough to know I can’t fix people- beyond the mechanics.”

“Let go. Rest.”

Stark seemed to sag then caught himself. “Okay, okay… One last thing,” he said, his voice hoarse. A body began to form in front of him of particles drawn from the atmosphere, green and red, cloaked in yellow. Then Stark raised the gauntlet, “Find protectors,” he commanded and the stones shot out from it in all directions. The Mind Stone returned to Vision and the Time Stone to Strange’s amulet, the other four stones scattered, flying out beyond the atmosphere.

And Stark collapsed. The two Guardians caught him as he fell. “We will take him with us,” the girl informed Quill with a certainty that gave lie to Barnes’ previous impression of her.

**Thinking back the battle just past, Barnes felt a touch of envy for Stark. The look in Mantis’ eyes had told him that she meant to take Stark away to give him time to heal, something Barnes had had precious little of. _‘Something I was too afraid to let myself have. Hope they convince him to let them.’_**

**Truth be told he was a bit envious of the young Guardian as well. _‘Can’t picture Lang having the grit to give voice to what he thought needed doing. He, all of ‘em, they wanted to be the Howlies, following Captain America into the gates of hell. Poor saps never figured out that was the propaganda people doing the telling, not us… Don’t know that there’s enough of me left to tell Stevie when he’s being a damn punk and to make it stick. Blind fools all of us, no wonder the aliens wanted in on that, wanted to be in Stevie’s shoes._**

_**‘But the Guardians? Little rookie says they’re taking Stark, nobody dismisses her. The big debate? Not who’s she to say but ‘What do you mean we can’t kidnap him?’** _


	5. Karma and Chaos

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tony isn't good at moderation.

Pietro Maximoff gasped. He looked down at his chest, _‘No blood, no bullet holes.’_ The mountains towered over the city of Novi Grad, as they always had. “Some nightmare,” he muttered.

Consumed by a feeling of unreality Pietro slowly wandered through the city streets. A part of him expected homicidal robots to leap out at him, another part expected to see himself and Wanda as children playing in the streets. The city wasn’t deserted; Pietro encountered dozens of other people wandering around in a similar state of shock; but there was a distinct emptiness to it. A man walked by and Pietro did a double-take, the man looked exactly like a fellow protester who he and Wanda had seen bludgeoned to death by the police when they’d been thirteen.

He heard the staticky sound of a cheap TV and followed it to a small bar. “For two weeks desperate, devastating battles against Thanos’ forces raged across New York City and then, a miracle, a city restored,” the onsite reporter declared. He moved aside and the cameraman focused in on Tony Stark leaning against Iron Patriot’s pilot. Unlike Iron Patriot, Stark still had his armor on excluding the helmet. There was a cut across his cheek and several long bruises starting beneath his hair and coming down on to his face as if a giant had tried to crush his skull.

Beneath the battle damage Pietro noted that Stark’s skin looked sallow and the bags under his eyes were darker than his bruises. _‘What do you know, Wanda’s stupid, let’s induce Stark to build something to destroy himself- And the planet! -plan had some pay off. I mean sure, I died and our whole city was destroyed but Stark looks like shit so it wasn’t for nothing,’_ Pietro thought sarcastically. Then, as his thoughts truly registered, Pietro’s face went pale. Images of Novi Grad wrenching itself from the Earth, of the battle against Ultron flashed through his mind’s eye. He remembered the kid, the archer trying to shield the boy with his body, sprinting toward them.

Pietro remembered that moment, the sudden realization that he and Wanda had started the dominoes toppling, they’d helped to keep Ultron’s plan on track- Ultron’s plan culminating in this, Novi Grad destroyed, possibly the entire human race along with their home. He remember realizing that, even if they won the battle, there would be casualties: Families shattered as their family had been. Live ruined, lives lost. In that second Pietro realized that no matter what he did after this he would never be able to rebalance the scales, he would never make up for what he’d done when he walked into that church and put himself at Ultron’s disposal. He remembered stepping into the bullets’ path instead of grabbing the archer and the kid and yanking them out of the way. He remembered the bullets ripping through him. _‘Not a nightmare. Not a nightmare.’_ Gasping for air, Pietro felt at his chest for the bullet holes. He was outside in heartbeat staring at the mountains towering over the city. Pietro fell to his knees, laughing in relief, _‘The mountains were OVER the city.’_

“A miracle,” the reporter had said, in New York but… Almost sobbing with relief Pietro went back inside to see if they’d say more about what had happened.

On the screen a number of medics were clustered around Stark. “I’m fine go bother someone else,” he tried to wave them away.

“You’re the only person bleeding in twenty miles,” one of the medics said. “The hospitals are empty, hell people in the fucking MORGUE were getting up and walking out.”

“You healed everyone except yourself?” Iron Patriot’s pilot sound pained but not surprised as he stood up and started prying at Iron Man’s armor.

“I forgot?” Stark offered. “Would you cut that out? It’s not coming off without a disassembly station.”

A medic shone a light in Stark’s eyes. “Concussion,” he called back to his colleagues.

The screen cut back to the studio, “We are getting confirmation from Mount Sinai Hospital, nearest to the epicenter. Every victim of violence in the hospital was miraculously healed, including those confirmed dead, twenty minutes ago, matching the timestamp from this video.” The newscaster’s image was replaced with a shaky cell phone recording. The video had been shot from several blocks away and at an awkward angle, but the red and gold armor was still recognizable, Stark’s hands moved as if he was conducting a symphony as the man hung in midair and rotated. One of his hands glowed, the light seemed to sink into his bones and spread. “We are continuing to seek confirmation of just what happened, but the damage to the City has been erased, the dead have come back to life… They said the completed Infinity Gauntlet possessed unlimited power. We are trying to ascertain how far the area affected by Tony Stark’s use of the artifact extends - Griffin, is there any chance we could ask Tony what he just did?”

The shot switched back to the onsite reporter. He shook his head, “Here, medics are still trying to determine the extent of Mr. Stark’s injuries.”

The camera refocused on Stark as a slim man covered from head to toe in blue and red swung into the camera frame. “There was a hardware store. I’ve got screwdrivers, wrenches- Um, everything I could grab.”

The pilot grinned at him, “Good thinking kid. One emergency disassembly station coming up.”

“I’m fine. This is totally excessive,” Stark protested.

“Tony, you fixed the tooth I lost in a bar fight twenty-two years ago but you forgot to fix the concussion you’re currently sporting,” the pilot pointed out dryly. “I’m not taking your word for it when you say you’re okay.”

Pietro wondered if he hallucinating when a raccoon shoved his way through the crowd around Stark waving some sort of futuristic looking tool. “I got this!” he announced as he pushed past the pilot and the kid.

“We can take care of his injuries too,” a blond in a long, red leather jacket told one of the medics. “Not to be insulting but Earth-tech is sort of pathetic.” He tossed a quick grin in Iron Man’s direction, “As a general rule. Not universally true.”

From off screen the onsite reporter resumed speaking, “However a Grade II concussion has been confirmed, it’s entirely possible that Tony Stark will not be capable of remembering clearly what he did. Some effects are more than obvious: The city rebuilt, the casualties of Thanos’ attack restored...” The reporter trailed off for a moment, then they saw him reach past the camera to grab his cameraman by the shoulder and turn him around. “Wasn’t Sevilla’s destroyed during the Chitauri Invasion six years ago?” he asked.

And Pietro was running, searching. Hope bubbled around a kernal of guilt in his gut. _‘Unlimited power, the dead brought back to life, Sokovia restored. Tony Stark, concussed and confused, trying to set things to right, and if I know my sister that Stark’s breathing is proof he’s been suffering for our parents’ deaths.’_ He turned a corner and found a weird agglomeration of the building where he’d grown up and the one that replaced it. Pietro raced inside, up the stair and into his childhood home. He slammed into the door, breaking it down then froze at the sight of a man with age-silvered hair and a much younger woman, who could have passed for Wanda’s sister due to the decade she’d been dead. “Mama? Papa?” Pietro whispered.

His mother moved first, walking unsteadily across the room she cupped Pietro’s face in her hands. “Pietro? Baby? Is it really you? You’ve grown so much.”

Pietro nodded.

“You didn’t die that day,” his father said.

“Not that day,” Pietro replied, his voice thick.

“But?”

“Three years ago. I- ”

“Wanda, is she?” his mother broke in.

“She was okay. I think- I think she’s with the Avengers, American superheroes,” Pietro stammered.

 

* * *

 

 

“Afghanistan has always been a country situated between great empires. A land in which the geography has stymied hundreds if not thousands of would be conquers. The history of conflict here is ancient,” A reporter narrated. “In the small city of Gulmira it seems that Tony Stark decided to reverse that history.”

A young boy pulled an older man into the camera, “This is Dost, he was my Great-great-great -um- great grandfather’s older brother,” the boy said excitedly. “He was killed in 1839 when the British Empire invaded us. My friend Musa, he says he found someone who died when Alexander of Macedon invaded but don’t believe him, he doesn’t speak any Bactrian, how would he talk to anyone from that far back?”

The older man scowled at the camera suspiciously and the boy patted his hand, “It’s okay Great Grandpa, it just shows us to people in other places.”

The screen switched to an American anchorman. “The discovery of illegally obtained Stark Industry weapons in Gulmira triggered the first known heroics attributed to Iron Man,” he said. “Is that the whole of Tony Stark’s connection to this unremarkable Afghani city or does he have a deeper connection to this place than previously imagined? Christine Everhart and WHiH were able to secure an interview with Dr. Stark to try to get some answers about all the miracles of the last day.”

The screen shifted once again to show a non-descript conference room. Tony Stark sat across from a blonde reporter, several butterfly bandages could be seen holding the cut over his cheek bone closed but other than that he looked uninjured, even the dark circles from the day before were invisible beneath stage makeup.

“So?” Christine asked. “Should I ask what it felt like to be a god for… roughly three minutes?”

“Is that what I was? I’ll have to add that to my resume: Genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist… and a god. I like the sound of that,” Tony laughed. “Honestly, the Gauntlet didn’t come with an instruction manual and three minutes isn’t really time to dwell on anything. The idea of unlimited power never really sank, I don’t think. Or I wasn’t thinking in terms of having unlimited power- It’s pretty inconceivable really. I was thinking about what I had to do before I ran into whatever limitations the gauntlet possessed because that’s what we do as Avengers, as heroes… As anyone really: We do the best we can with whatever we’ve got. The idea that I wasn’t going to run into limitations… It was just too far outside of my concept of reality.”

“And here I thought your motto was ‘Go big or go home’.”

Tony shrugged, “I wanted to stop Thanos. Once that was done I wanted to repair the damage he’d done to my city. It shouldn’t be terribly surprising that I’m well versed in classical sci-fi and the pitfalls of time travel that have been imagined: Paradoxes, branching time streams, causality loops… Putting cause and effect out of order undermines the basic tenements of rationality, something I wanted to steer clear of. So I couldn’t just turn back time to undo what Thanos had done. I was afraid if I told the Infinity Stones to fix the damage Thanos had done it’d be a deal with the devil thing- Something like Thanos knocks down a wall and it crushes Joe Schmoe, so I ask the Infinity Stones to undo _Thanos’_ damage and the wall’s standing fine but poor old Joe is still dead because the wall killed him not Thanos… I was worried about being too narrow. It never occurred to me that with the Stones I _could_ bring back a kid who caught a stray bullet five years ago, which means I didn’t consider whether or not I _should_ bring him back. So um…” Tony hesitated stumbling, uncharacteristically over his words. “Lydia, don’t be grateful to me. I’m happy I helped your family but it was -um- collateral undamage? Is that a thing?”

“Lagos? Sokovia? Johannesburg? Gulmira?” Christine asked. “We’re still discovering other places.”

“Like I said, working my way down a mental checklist of of things I wanted to fix, expecting to run out of juice at any moment,” Tony shrugged.

“Not Bucharest?” Christine pushed.

“Earlier jokes aside, I’m human,” Tony said. “I wasn’t onsight for Bucharest, I wasn’t there for the clean-up. I was dealing with the rest of that shit-show, trying to help my best friend deal with losing the use of his legs and recovering from my own injuries. You and the rest of the media called it a civil war, and while I might think that’s going too far there were definitely sides drawn up. By the time I thought about the damage done to the people of Bucharest, it was something the _other_  team did. Bucharest deserved fixing as much as any of the other places but because that disaster was something _my_ team was only involved in putting a stop to, it wasn’t weighing on my mind the same way.”

“You weren’t at Lagos either,” Christine pointed out.

“Not during but I was there afterwards trying- Let’s be blunt, I was making a belated effort at spin control, trying to stave off a government official showing up at the compound with the news that Wanda Maximoff’s visa had been revoked,” Tony said. “But I saw the injured with my own eyes, I talked to family members of the victims while I was waiting for King T’Chaka to have time to see me. Even if I wasn’t there for the fight _seeing_ the aftermath, once the adrenaline is gone, burns it into your brain.”

 

* * *

 

“I’ve spoken to some of the reporters,” Pietro told his parents. “Wanda did go with the Avengers after Ultron destroyed Novi Grad and during their split she sided with the group led by Captain America- or the alien posing as him.”

“Captain America was a great hero during the war,” his father said thoughtfully.

“And Stark was the other side,” Pietro added frankly. “Like the others in Captain America’s faction, Wanda returned to fight Thanos. The reporters tell me she vanished from the Avengers’ ranks after the alien was exposed. No one knows what became of her but I think I’ve found one group who will help us get to New York, to ask the Avengers.”

His father frowned, “They expect a spectacle.”

“Could the aliens have replaced Wanda?” his mother worried.

“I doubt they could have replicated her abilities,” Pietro reassured her. He didn’t say that Wanda’s powers should have alerted her to the imposter as they’d warned her of Ultron’s true goals and that he didn’t know what it meant that his sister had apparently sided with the alien anyway.

 

* * *

 

 

“Shot have been fired at the Stark Tower press conference!” A rattled and slightly manic young reporter declared as he crouched behind an overturned table along with his cameraman.

The scene showed Iron Man, War Machine, Captain Marvel newly returned to Earth and the largest of the Guardians clustered around the shooter. “We won’t be able to tell if his blood changes without a microscope,” Marvel was saying.

Drax shrugged, “Kill him and he turns into a Skrull… or he doesn’t, who cares?”

“Hold on a second here!” Iron Man protested.

“Or we could cut off, say, his trigger finger,” War Machine suggested. “If he is a Skrull we’d still be able to question him about what they’re planning. You can _talk_ without a finger.”

“Or we can drag him up to the lab and take a blood sample, it’s literally an elevator ride away,” Iron Man insisted. “It’s- I mean it’s totally plausible that he really is angry because I didn’t save his wife. I didn’t- A person shouldn’t have that sort of power- Who I saved, it was selfish, caperious. Forty-eight hour grace period before the first guy with a bone to pick about me playing god? That’s- that’s pretty good right? Why are we seriously talking about mutilating or killing the poor guy?”

“Tony!” War Machine exclaimed. “You save the world, stop a warlord responsible for uncountable deaths across the galaxy, save everyone you can think of… And don’t tell me you ‘forgot’ to heal your own injuries- You were planning on using the Gauntlet to keep on bringing people back until it burned you out! So don’t fucking tell me it’s okay for ingrateful crazies to be take potshots at you because you didn’t do enough!”

“Quill would say something nice sounding about how this crap like that doesn’t happen with the Guardians,” Drax announced. “But it does, all the time. We’ve gotten good at spotting morons.”

“Thanks,” War Machine said grudgingly. “For spotting that one.”

 

* * *

 

 

Pietro’s father stood awkwardly in the entrance to the bedroom the twins had shared as children. “After I married your mother I wanted to put my past behind me. There were things done to me, things I did in retaliation, that I wanted to forget. But apparently the past is not a door so easily closed,” he said. “You and your sister both have powers.”

“We wanted to avenge you and Mama,” Pietro interrupted. “A man came, he told us he could give us the power to end the turmoil in our country, to claim justice from those who had caused our grief- It was Tony Stark’s missile that killed you and no one cared!”

“Who was this man?” Pietro gasped as he caught sight of his father’s frozen expression. “Who did he work for?” the older man demanded harshly.

“Dr List, Baron von Strucker,” Pietro said, unable to even contemplate prevaricating when his father used that tone.

“HYDRA,” the older man hissed. “You and your sister gave yourself to HYDRA, to Nazis!” Pietro’s father shoved him up against the wall hard enough to shower them with plaster.

His mother came running.

“For you!” Pietro protested, confused. “No one would have ever punished Stark for what he did to us! To our family. For two days, after you and Mama died, Wanda and I were trapped! For two days, we waited for Tony Stark to kill us!”

Pietro’s father drew back his fist, his other hand still knotted in Pietro’s collar as he pressed him into the wall.

“Eric stop! He’s our son!”

Pietro slumped in relief when his father’s fist dropped. The older man shoved him to the floor. “He is no son of mine,” he snarled.

Pietro stared up at his father. “We did it for you,” he said in shock.

Eric jerked his sleeve back and shoved the faded numbers tattooed on his wrist into his son’s face. “I lost my childhood in their camps, you idiot boy! What you volunteered for I had inflicted upon me! You threw your lot in with the same murderers and monsters I spent decades hunting after the War Ended! You made yourself into everything I loathe! And then you say you did it for me!” If not for your mother I would kill you here and now!” He spun on his heel and stalked out of the room. A moment later they heard the front door slam.

Pietro turned to his mother.

She looked away. “You didn’t know but you still betrayed everything your father stood for,” she took a deep breath, “I would not expect his forgiveness- Ever.” Pietro’s mother took a deep breath, “I am- It is not so personal for me. I was born long after World War II ended. Your father, he is older than he appears- What they did to him- He survived, many did not. They used him, conducted cruel experiments on him. They thought, because he was very young, his body might more easily accept being changed. He thought their experiments had no effect but time didn’t wear on him as it should… I did not live through what your father did, it is not the same for me. You will always be my child, no matter what you have done. And yet… I would have been happy that you and your sister survived. But to hear that you took the life you were given and wasted it on revenge, it steals that joy because you did not _live_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I thought about having Magneto’s typical power set emerge due to the stress of finding out that his kids became Nazis, but I prefer X-Men and Avengers to be in separate universes given the Civil War. “Days of Futures Past” is just too ingrained in the X-Men universe.


	6. Listening at Keyholes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’ve seen IW now but I’m much too deep in this story to incorporate anything from the movie. Also I’ve seen S2 of Jessica Jones but I’m going to ignore the reveal from the last episode as I’d already written the battle scenes without considering _that_ character as a potential addition to the superhero ranks (even though I did call out both Wing and Knight among the combatants earlier).

The officious knock at his door sent a shiver down Scott’s spine. _‘What’d I do?’_ he wondered as went to answer it. _‘I mean, yeah sure, I picked the wrong side in the Civil War, that’s obvious. That we were following CAPTAIN AMERICA was the only justification we had and it turned out the guy we were following wasn’t really him. But Stark’s okay with me now, he and Hank worked together on that knew super-expanding crap Hope and I used against Thanos- That was gross! Making ourselves small enough to get inside his body and planting bombs. And they didn’t even work as more than distractions. -Stark gave them to me personally. He accepted me as part of the team, even if we got off to a rocky start. So why do I feel like I’m in big trouble?’_

He opened the door and found Everett Ross flanked by a number of military personnel in combat gear along with two of the New York street heroes that Stark had brought in to help against Thanos: Misty Knight, the ex-detective with the prosthetic arm and Jessica Jones, the bad tempered, frequently drunk PI. Hank stood at the rear of the group, his pinched expression didn’t give Scott any reassurance. “Mr. Lang, you’re under arrest,” Ross declared. “Surrender and turn over the Ant-Man gear peaceably or we are authorized to use deadly force.”

Scott yanked his hands up quickly. “What for?” he whined as he nodded in the direction of the closet where he had his gear stowed.

“You’re being charged with violations of the Espionage Act, specifically with aiding in conveying information critical to the defense of this planet to hostile alien forces,” Ross announced.

_‘That’s like treason! I could get the death penalty!’_ Scott felt himself pale. “Is this because I helped Cap- Skrull-Cap get into Stark’s lab? But I didn’t know he was a Skrull! I was just helping solve a problem with team morale- Um, communications- We just thought Cap wanted to tell Stark to stop being a dick! We didn’t know-”

Ross rolled his eyes, “You didn’t know it was wrong to break into another person’s private space? Via aiding to bring down their computerized defenses, exposing both their person and, more importantly, their data to external attack? I guess you fooled your parole board then, as your previous release was contingent upon the belief that you HAD learned that breaking and entering, both digitally and physically, was against the law.”

Scott squirmed, “But- treason?”

“The charges brought against you by Ms. Potts and Stark Industries only included industrial espionage,” Ross answered grimly. “But Stark designs easily half the equipment used by those Enhanced who signed the Sokovia Accords and his systems protect databases including medical records on almost every Enhanced who has volunteered to defend the Earth against external threats. And you helped to breech those systems. You handed that information to the Skrull on a silver platter!”

“But I didn’t know!” Scott protested as Knight held up a pair of handcuffs. “I didn’t know,” he repeated as he offered her his hands.

“If it’d been what you thought it was-” Jones broke off abruptly. She gave him a look of revulsion.

“I hate when they don’t press charges,” Knight muttered to herself.

Scott felt a sinking sensation in his gut as he thought back on the past few months since he and the rest of 'Team!Cap’ had returned to the U.S.

 

* * *

 

_Two Months Earlier_

As the Avengers Compound became visible through the clouds Scott shared a moment of triumph with his team. After Cap- Well not Cap anymore since the US government was corrupt and tried to control them, but Scott still didn’t feel comfortable calling him ‘Steve’ so- After Cap had rescued them from the Raft he’d told them to split so they could stay under the radar until the world realized that the Sokovia Accords were nothing more than a dirty government attempt to put a leash on the people’s heroes.

Scott had gone back to his family, to Hope and Hank. It hadn’t been a particularly happy homing-coming. He was back to square one with Paxton and Maggie, having to beg to see his own daughter. Even Cassie didn’t really see him as a hero anymore, she seemed to think he needed a minder. And Cassie also made Scott promise to tell Captain America that her stepfather was a good police officer, that she and her mom loved him and to please not hurt him.  Hearing his daughter ask that had made Scott feel a little queasy if he was honest with himself.

Hope and Hank had a better notion of what was what but Scott hadn’t got a particularly warm welcome there either.  His involvement in Leipzig had given the government the excuse they needed to try to seize Hank’s Pym Particles. They’d claimed he was supplying arms to terrorists- _‘Of all the ridiculous things! Captain America was no terrorist!’_ Hank was mostly, rightfully, ticked at the government for trying to steal his invention but he also had quite a bit to say about Scott giving them leverage to come after him. Hope was even less _‘How dare they do this to us!’_ and more _‘What sort of dumb shit are you to put us in this situation?’_ with a healthy side of _‘I’m starting to really sympathize with your ex-wife, Scott.’_ He was pretty sure the only thing that saved their relationship was the binding effect of being shot at together.

Then word of Thanos came. It was what they were waiting for, a threat too big for the government to trust Stark to handle it. The UN had to acknowledge that they needed the Avengers more than they needed a leash on them now but- But at the same time Scott wished it had never happened because he’d rather stay a fugitive, even a fugitive who Cassie didn’t quite trust anymore and have her safe than be vindicated at the cost of the Earth- Cassie! -being endangered by some freaky alien with nearly god-like powers and a death-fetish. Cap called them back together in preparation for the inevitable call to assemble, then came the worst part: The waiting for everyone else to realize what they already knew.

_“Fuck Stark!” Clint snarled as they watched the nightly news. “Who does he think he’s fooling, calling in those nobodies. The world needs the Avengers.”_

_Scott sympathized, he wanted to be doing something to protect his family not hanging around waiting for a bunch of politicians enabled by Tony Stark to collectively pull their heads of their ass, but privately he thought it would have sounded better coming from pretty much anyone other than Hawkeye. It seemed like most of the street fighters Stark had drummed up had some sort of power and Clint was a guy who was really good with a bow and arrow._

_“It’ll actually better this way,” Natasha said. “If Tony was lobbying for our return, 117 countries would have to admit that they were wrong. This way they can save face by forcing TONY to stop being an obstacle.” She gave an artful little shrug, “They’ll probably put together some sort of amended, toothless version of the Accords for us to sign and then the whole thing will look like it a big misunderstanding: It wasn’t that we really went against the UN, it was that Tony did a terrible job of explaining the Accords to us.”_

_“It WAS all Stark’s fault,” Wanda huffed._

_Natasha rolled her eyes. “Please don’t let Tony hear you attributing that sort of power to him, his ego is more than large enough as it is.”_

It ended up being two weeks before the U.S. withdrew its support from the Accords. In the same press conference the President pardoned the Avengers and asked them to come home. And now they were using the last of the Quinjet’s fuel to return to the Avengers’ Compound to receive their pardons. Because the world needed them.

The Quinjet dropped below the clouds and Scott gulped as he realized that the reason the Compound driveway looked white was because it was jam-packed with News vans.

“So that’s why T’Challa warned us about not airing any grievances publicly,” Natasha murmured.

Clint, remembering Tony’s complaints about Bifrost scorches, brought the Quinjet down squarely on top of a rose bed west of the Compound’s main building. He opened the hatch and the team formed up behind Captain America for their triumphant return. The Falcon stood at their leader’s right hand and the Scarlet Witch at his left, Hawkeye and the Black Widow behind them. _‘Rear guard is important,’_ Scott told himself. _‘It means they trust me to watch their backs.’_ He glanced over at Barnes who had also been left in the back. _‘Why does he look like he doesn’t even want to get off the plane?’_

Camera flashed in blinding numbers as they stepped on to American soil for the first time in almost two years. Scott blinked the spots out of his eyes and took in the welcoming committee. There were three distinct groupings: Stark and his team were front and central. T’Challa, several of his Dora, one Ross and a couple other representative from the UN stood in a cluster off to the right while the other Ross was on the left along with the US President, a couple suits and a security detail. _‘Ross- The bad Ross- Badder Ross? T’Challa seems sort of chummy with the other Ross- And, of course, T’Challa is happy to see us cleared- But is his Ross supposed to be bad or not? Anyway, Definitely-Bad-Ross looks like someone shoved a whole lemon TREE down his throat. Sucks for him that we slipped his leash.’_ Scott felt a satisfied smirk curling his lips. He was pretty sure the guys with the President were there to deliver their pardons.

Of Stark’s Avengers, only War Machine and Vision still stood with him. _‘I guess that Spider-guy got sick of Stark’s bullshit just like Natasha and T’Challa,’_ Scott concluded smugly. _‘And look at that! Vision’s making eyes at Wanda from behind Starks’ back.’_ Rhodes’ faceplate was down, his armor at parade rest, posture showing no more emotion than his mask. Stark was also in his armor but the helmet was off and judging from his styled hair and red-tinted sunglasses hiding his eyes he’d never had it on. Stark smiled at them, “Let me be the first to say ‘Welcome back’ Cap.”

Cap smiled back as he and Tony shook hands and cameras flashed, “Thanks Tony. It’s good to be back.”

Then they all moved to the podium where the president formally pardoned them and made a speech about his confidence in their ability to keep the planet safe. After the two heads of state left along with their security details and most of the suits the floor was thrown open to questions.

“How will the Avengers function as a team in the wake of your, very ugly, breakup?” Christine Everhart asked.

“Let me take this one,” Stark said stepping forward. “During the Chitauri Invasion most of the team had never met- And first impressions weren’t the best. In particular, Cap here and I rubbed each other wrong but when the bullets started to fly we had each other’s back, without fail. - Well, except for that turbine incident but that was totally justified,” Stark said with a grin.

“Completely,” Cap agreed, matching Stark’s light tone.

“There are wide variety of strong personalities among the Avengers,” Stark continued more seriously. “We are going to quarrel, it’s the nature of the beast. This last one was unfortunately public and explosive due to personal issues getting drawn into what should have been a professional dispute. But! When it comes to to a fight like the one we’re looking at when Thanos’ forces arrive? There is no one I’d rather follow into battle than Steve Rogers. He doesn’t know how to lose.”

The Q&A thing went on for awhile. The Avengers got several more variations on Everhart’s question plus exercises in avoiding “So what HAVE you been up to these last couple years?” And Stark talked way too much about his new recruits in Scott’s opinion, _'Captain America didn’t invite them, they don’t count.’_

Ross the Not-So-Bad fielded a bunch of questions about how the UN was going to handle countries who hadn’t signed the Accords. The signatory nations had all agreed to suspend the restrictions on who could fight and where until Thanos was dealt with. Of the sixty UN countries who were still holding out against the Accords, Scott was shocked to learn that only about a third of them thought that the Accords were too restrictive, forty countries had refused to sign because they believed that the Accords, as they currently stood, were too permissive and some of them, Thanos not withstanding, didn’t want ANY foreign Enhanced within their borders regardless of whether or not they had signed the Accords. _‘And I thought all the countries that opposed the Accords were on our side.’_

Ross the Evil made noise about how Thanos was just a temporary suspension of the Accords not a permanent repeal of the laws. That afterwards Team!Cap would have to choose between signing or going back to being fugitives as their pardons only offered amnesty for PAST Accords violations. _‘Saving face,’_ Scott assured himself. _‘The Accords are in their death throes.’_

Then it was over and Stark was leading them into Compound.

“Turbine Incident?” Scott whispered to Natasha once they were out of the public eye.

“Steve was supposed to pull a lever to slow the turbine on the Helicarrier so Stark wouldn’t get sucked through it once he jump started it. Steve got jumped by Loki’s forces, he didn’t get back to the lever soon enough.” Natasha shrugged, “Stark’s armor protected him, it wasn’t a big deal.”

_‘Not... exactly... what I was expecting to hear,’_ Scott thought before being distracted by the gaping hole in the floor, _‘Actually more like a eight or nine floors.’_

“That... hasn’t been repaired yet?” Vision asked sounding strangely choked voice.

“Haven’t bothered getting around to it,” Stark replied flatly. When he turned to face them the smiles from the press conference were pointedly gone. “The Earth is at stake, this is a fight that we absolutely cannot lose, I think given the circumstances we have enough common ground to pretend to be a team once more for old time’s sake.” He gave Steve a hollow unfriendly smile, “Your kind of fight, Rogers: Completely black and white, not fighting, NOT WINNING is not an option.

“Your rooms are where you left them. As for your two new hanger-ons, there are plenty of empties. I don’t care.” Stark shrugged. “New gear is the armory. Don’t worry, Wakanda supplied most of it. We’ll need to hash out a schedule: training and tactical discussions. Best estimate we’ve got a month and a some change before Thanos hits Earth. Is it too soon to start planning to win this war? Or will that get more people killed than waiting until he’s actually on the planet? Either way, it’d probably be good if we’ve all seen each other fight at least once or twice before we go into battle together.

“Other than that, lets act like we’re all friends in public… And the rest of the time? Well, the new guys all have actual lives, jobs, responsibilities. They won’t be here unless you schedule their time. Thor needs to stick close to his people while the UN works out immigration procedures for a couple hundred extraterrestrials.  The Scandinavian countries are actually fighting over who gets to give them a home, given the cultural history they share with Asgard. Banner and the other assorted Sakaar escapees plan to stick with the Asgardians.

"Vision? You still planning to move back in here?” Stark glanced pointedly at the hole in the floor.

Vision nodded once.

“Your choice. If you change your mind, Rhodey and I will be at the manor along with the Guardians.”

“Tony,” Cap interjected. “We need to be a team again.”

“Staying at the Compound’s inconvenient given my physio schedule,” Rhodes said, his armor’s speakers rendering his voice coldly mechanical.

“Sorry man, we didn’t realize,” Sam interjected.

Rhodes ignored him, “Same for the Guardians. They’re acting as liaisons between the UN and the Nova Empire and there’s no spaceship parking at the UN complex.”

Natasha turned to Tony, “They have good reasons but if you avoid us the press will pick-up on it. The show you just put on out there will be for nothing.”

Tony grimaced. He turned to Vision, “Well, it looks like you’re not getting rid of me after all,” he sighed.

Scott gapped at Natasha and Cap, _‘What are they thinking? Why’d they talk him into staying? No one wants Stark here!’_

 

* * *

 

 

Two weeks later the hole in the floor still hadn’t been fixed, not really. Scott convinced Barnes to loan him some muscles. The two of them bought a stack of sheet metal and some bolts from a construction company ten miles up the road. With the Super Soldier’s help Scott had hauled the sheeting home and bolted it in place on both top and bottom of all the floors that had been breached.

The next morning Clint stomped in muttering curses under his breath and stubbed his toe on the raised edge of the sheeting. “Mother-fucking-” he exclaimed as he glared at the still grossly visible scar left on the building from the Avengers’ Civil War. He cracked his knuckles menacingly, “On top of everything else that bastard… The next time I see Stark…”

_‘Maybe if I put a bevel on the plate so it’d be less of a trip hazard,’_ Scott thought to himself. _‘Or I could go buy some rugs and throw them over it. Rugs with a bevel and you’d hardly even know it was there- On this level anyway. Bevel and PAINT the ceiling again on the lower levels? Better than hoping no one ever looks up I guess.’_

“So what did Stark do this time?” Sam sighed tiredly. “I mean beside still not hiring someone to fix the hole. He built the entire compound in much less time than it’s take to fix a couple holes in the floor and STILL Scott’s the closest we’ve gotten to a contractor looking at that.”

“What hasn’t Stark done?” Wanda wondered. “We’re out of butter again.”

“Not to mention creamer and syrup,” Natasha added.

From his place at the stove, Vision gave them a downcast look then quietly left. Scott didn’t really blame him, he knew the Synthoid considered Stark to be as close to family as he had and it had to be uncomfortable for him to listen to the various bitch-fests about Stark- _'Even if the man earned everyone one of our complaints.'_

“Thank god Stark considers coffee to be a staple,” Scott whispered to Barnes. He’d learned not to make that sort of ‘dumbass, Pollyanna’ comment to the group at larger. Barnes rolled his eyes in response. _‘Not an engineer,’_ Scott tsked and nudged Barnes with his shoulder.

“Why don’t we go out for breakfast,” Cap suggested. “They’re pretty friendly at that little dinner in town.”

“Sounds good to me,” Clint agreed and a few minutes later they were loaded up in a van and headed into town.

“So really, what did Stark do this time?” Sam asked. “I mean beyond the general pettiness.”

“That asshole put some sort of proximity sensor in my new EMP arrows so they won’t go off near his or Rhodes’ armor. Probably his little Spider-fan’s too,” Clint snarled.

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” Natasha said. “It’s like the floor, just another way of letting us know that he’s still holding grudge, still trying to _pretend_ he was the victim in all that ‘Civil War’ nonsense.”

“Ch!” Wanda exclaimed in disgust.

_‘If I were Stark, I wouldn’t want to be arming Clint with crap that could take me out of the sky either,’_ Scott thought, that thought he didn’t dare voice even to Barnes.

Cap sighed loudly, “I’ve tried to be patient with Tony but- He’s like a spoiled child throwing a temper tantrum. It looks like we’re going to have to force the issue if we intend to be a functional team before Thanos gets here.”

“Stark needs someone to tell him what the upright, moral thing to do is,” Sam said thoughtfully. “That’s probably why he supported the Accords in the first place: He needs that sort of oversight to keep from screwing up so he just can’t understand that the rest of us know right from wrong without governmental hand-holding.”

Scott nodded eagerly. _‘Everything Sam says just sounds so reasonable.’_

“You’ve got to give him credit for his tech though,” Natasha sighed. “There’s no way past FRIDAY.”

Wanda shivered. “After Ultron, that he still risks creating another such monstrosity.” She turned to Steve with wide eyes. “I’m so grateful you put your foot down and made him take that thing out of our wing.”

“I wish we could have kept her out of the Compound altogether,” Cap said seriously. “But it’s Tony’s building and the Council supported using her as part of the security system. Apparently they’re happy with the safeties he has in place.”

“And we have to answer to these idiots,” Clint snorted.

“FRIDAY is a major obstacle to having me having a real talk with Tony,” Cap sighed. “The moment we get back to the Compound he retreats to his private areas and she won’t let me in. When I do catch him before he locks himself away, I swear, FRIDAY invents an emergency to get Tony away.”

“But my hacking doesn’t stand a chance against Stark’s AI.” Natasha leaned forward, looking straight at Scott with a helpless expression that made him desperately want to rescue her.

“Normally I couldn’t either,” Scott admitted.

“Normally?” Natasha asked, her gaze sharpening.

“Well, as an outside job I couldn’t,” Scott said. “But I did oversee FRIDAY’s removal from our wing and I saw the power cables from the back up generator run under our wing, her blindspot now.”

“Go on,” Natasha encouraged.

“An external attacker takes out the power to the Compound and nothing gained, there’s the backup generator. But us-“

“We take out the backup at the first!” Clint exclaimed.

“And FRIDAY reroutes power from another point on the grid in- oh- five minutes.” Natasha rolled her eyes. “FRIDAY isn’t down if we take out the power at the Compound, her servers are… I don’t even know where Stark has them hidden but after he lost J.A.R.V.I.S. you know the security’s probably like Fort Knox multiplied by the Raft. So let the tech-savvy member of the team talk Clint.”

Scott tried not to feel too pathetically grateful to Natasha for standing up for him. “We plant a Trojan horse on the generator’s control system,” Scott said. “Look, Stark gave FRIDAY a personality, strange as it sounds, I’ll wager that she really cares about him.”

“Of course Stark must _program_ beings to care for him,” Wanda scoffed.

“If Stark’s on site and FRIDAY loses her eyes on him...” Scott continued doggedly. “You should have heard the objections, the whole time we were removing her access to our wing of the Compound, she doesn’t trust you with him, like, at all. And, somehow, she feels. So we do this while Stark’s in his lab-”

“Stark’s lab is the most secure room in the Compound,” Sam said dubiously. “I don’t think a nuclear strike would make a dent when he’s on lock-down.”

“That’s the point,” Scott barreled on. “All access is controlled through the onsite hardware. No wireless, no cell signal there. Once the power’s down FRIDAY’s onsite hardware is down and she is complete cut off from Stark. And that will scare her. She’s going to be in a hurry to re-establish contact. Which increases the odds that she’ll miss the Trojan Horse in her rushy to get power back and get eyes on Stark again.”

Natasha smiled slowly. “I’m impressed,” she said.

 

* * *

 

 

The plan worked.

Natasha planted the Trojan Horse after Scott had written it. They waited for a day when neither Rhodes or Spider-Man were scheduled to visit. Wanda got Vision out of the way. And while Cap waited outside of Stark’s lab, Clint took out the Compound’s connection to the main power grid. Sam was left in charge of dealing with anything unexpected that might come up.  Cap got his talk with Stark and that solved things, in the the team’s opinion.

Not quite a week after they got that straightened out the Avengers had their first training and strategizing session with Stark’s new recruits.

“I like to know who I’m fighting alongside,” Cap said afterwards as he stood at the window watching the newbies, except for Strange who magicked himself home with a portal climb into the car Stark had provided in the driveway below. He gave Daredevil and Spider-Man a particularly stern scowl. Then he turned to Scott with an expectant look.

Scott took the hint and a few minutes later he and Ant-ony were hitching a ride on the roof of the limo, hidden in the crack created by the sunroof both to stay out of the wind and to eavesdrop. Remembering Daredevil’s enhanced senses Scott bit down on his habit of talking to Ant-ony while he listened in on their conversations.  Scott only caught one word in ten from the discussion inside the car but he figured he wasn’t missing anything the team would care about. From what he could hear, Starks recruits were apparently humoring Spider-Man while the younger hero rambled on, at length, about his thesis or some other research project. It sounded a little too biological for Scott but interesting enough that he wished he could hear more. However, from the expressions on the faces the other passengers it was clear that they were being polite rather than really following what the wall-crawler was talking about.  Still they weren’t making any effort to shut the kid up. _‘Nice of ‘em,’_ Scott though.

First Stark’s driver dropped Spider-Man off with a reminder to check in before doing any patrolling and Scott agonized for a moment before deciding to stick with the larger group.  Danny Rand’s identity wasn’t a secret so Scott expected that the car would take them to Rand Enterprises or some swanky residence maintained by the young billionaire. Instead, the remaining group of heroes ended up at a small dojo that showed obvious care but but not a surfeit of resources.

Colleen Wing and Danny Rand pulled out tables and chairs, acting as hosts, while Daredevil changed out of his costume in a backroom and Misty Knight checked over her prosthetic arm for any damage. Another woman arrived with take-out, she greeted Luke Cage with a kiss, which doesn’t diminish the tension that Scott had noticed between Cage and Jessica Jones from the moment Stark’s recruits had arrived at the Compound. Daredevil returned in street clothes, revealed as a good looking but not terribly remarkable man with dark glasses hiding his eyes, _‘He not a celebrity, so what’s his excuse?’_ Scott wondered. _‘I mean there’s no way that he’s blind.’_

“So, the Avengers,” Rand started off brightly. “They were…” he trailed off.

Cage shook his head. “Yeah that.”

“A little clarification for those of us not invited?” the late-comer, Scott thought he’d heard her called Claire, asked.

“Don’t look at me!” Jones said derisively. “As soon as I made is clear that I wasn’t interested in being shown the error of my ways by ‘Good Old Fashion American Values’™ his whole posse was giving me the stink-eye.”

“I don’t need another cult in my life,” Wing said.

“Come on, the Avengers, a cult? Seriously?” Claire asked.

“Cult of personality,” Knight said. “Captain America is… He’s polite, those old fashioned manners you’d expect, but I got the feeling that he he’s not someone to be questioned.  And _that_ doesn't seem to worry anyone.”

“You’re saying this after the whole Avengers Civil War thing?” Claire asked.

The others traded awkward glances then Daredevil said, “I just have to ask: Does Stark have red hair?”

Rand looked disapproving but there was more than one snort of amusement. “Naw, he’s only figuratively the Avengers’ red-headed stepchild,” Jones replied. “Anyone else see it? Stark’s holding something back.”

Up in the rafters Scott leaned forward. _‘If Stark’s keeping secrets again the team needs to know about it- Before we have another Ultron on our hands.’_

“He talks like a lawyer,” Cage complained. “No offense intended, Murdock.”

“If cracks about lawyers bothered me, I’m in the wrong profession,” Daredevil waved off the comment. “Besides, you’re right. Stark’s being careful about what he says. Honestly, I’d actually trust him less if he tried to act like he was being completely forthcoming. We don’t know him, he doesn’t know us. He doesn’t owe us every last detail… But he is hard to get a read on, even for me. He’s scared. All the time. Could be PTSD. Could be Thanos.”

Jones rolled her eyes “Or it could be he’s got good reason not to feel safe. We all saw it. Forget he’s Tony fucking Stark. Forget powers. What’s it add up to?”

“There’s friction but- Captain America?” Rand asked.

“We all grew up on that cartoon,” Knight said. “But we’re talking about a person not a Saturday morning TV hero.”

“Stark may be careful with his words,” Daredevil said. “Maximoff and Barton aren’t. Romanoff changed sides. Vision is trying appeasement. Stark’s keeping Rhodes and the kid out of the crossfire. If we forget the Avengers, forget it’s Stark...

Knight nodded, “Outside of the suit he’s an unEnhanced human without any particular combat skills, unlike almost everyone else there. He’s isolated. His home is a hostile environment… He has the resources to leave, of course, but the UN has made it clear that they don’t think we’re enough to stop Thanos without the Avengers and Stark’s planted his flag behind listening to the majority.

“But, like every domestic, there's not much that we can do while Stark’s insisting that everything’s fine.” Knight leaned into Daredevil’s space. “And don’t you go getting ideas, Murdock! Daredevil already has a dozen complaints sworn out against him by families because they rallied around the asshole you were protecting them from.”

_'They’re- They’re just biased because the public doesn’t trust **them** to handle Thanos,'_  Scott told himself. _'I mean, **us** abusing Stark? That’s crazy talk!'_

“It’s not like you can go over there and rough up Captain America anyway,” Jones pointed out, her tone pragmatic.

“I don’t know about that,” Daredevil said. “He’s strong but-”

“He’s self-taught,” Rand interjected. “And tThis probably isn’t a good line of thought to be encouraging is it?”

“Self-taught,” Daredevil agreed. “As in he’s never accepted any correction about his weak points, that’s obvious enough. I wouldn’t be surprised if it went past HOW he fights…” He held up his hands calmingly before Knight could say anything, “But Stark is being very specific. Maybe we should wait until after Thanos to… Consider our options. None of us would be standing here if we were the type to turn a blind eye… Figuratively speaking.”

 

* * *

 

 

Contractors came out and repaired the hole in the floors. The kitchen was stocked with more than survival fare. Cap insisted on Stark joining them for team meals and Scott tried not to think about Crow’s Cages and defeated enemies put on display while they suffered a slow death.  The Avengers had joint training sessions with the Defenders, the Guardians and Thor’s Revengers but the other three teams kept their own council. They remained separate entities from the Avengers and continued to prefer using Stark as their point of contact.

Then the Children of Thanos came. Vision fell and Captain America was revealed as Skrull imposter. Stark took over as the leader of Earth’s forces and Wanda disappeared into the night. Natasha took friendly fire from Wanda then a bad hit to head two days later and fell into a coma. And Clint started looking at all of them as potential targets.

_Scott walked into the conference room and stopped in his tracks: Hank Pym was standing there with Stark, both of them bent over a hologram as if Stark- All Starks weren’t public enemy number one in Hank’s eyes. Hope bumped into his back. “Scott?” she asked then leaned around his shoulder to see the hold-up for herself. “Dad?!”_

_“We are talking about the Apocalypse,” Hank grumbled. “Seems fitting I’m working with a Stark again.”_

_“I love you too,” Stark said rolling his eyes. “And with that out of the way. We can’t afford to play nice anymore. Your Pym Particles have the potential to play very dirty pool. So what happens if you shrink down… Say a safe? I don’t care, a chunk of iron, uranium, anything nice and dense. Shrink it down, plant it in someone’s gut- braincase, and then…” He bared his teeth in a grin that was anything but friendly. “Unshrink it?”_

They fought Thanos as if there would be no tomorrow coming. Later, the record would show that the battle lasted less than a half-hour but while it was happening there it felt like a lifetime, there was no before, no after. For just under thirty minutes nothing else existed except the need to stop Thanos, to survive. Then Tony Stark took up the Infinity Gauntlet and rewrote the rules: Reality warped, the dead rose and when it was over Thanos and the damage he’d wrought on the Earth was erased.  

Scott watched the world change around him, day to day, moment to moment in a sort of stunned bemusement.

In the aftermath it took less than twenty-four hours for airports, border stations and government buildings to add blood testing to screen for Skrulls. Sergeant Barnes’ information uncovered a dozen infiltrators directly and put them on a trail that led to one of Sokovia’s neighbors: Latveria. Initially Latveria’s Dictator-President, Victor von Doom refused the UN entry to his country but the press of evidence forced him to investigate himself and soon the news was flooded with images of a new war and of bodies stacked to the ceiling in basements all over Latveria as it became clear that Doom was practically the only surviving human in the country, his people having been slaughtered enmass and replaced by the alien invaders.

Scott was almost relieved to be so unimportant as to be forgotten. The world was changing and, for the moment, all it asked of him was to watch.

Hope and Pepper, Rhodes and Danvers and, inevitably, Tony Stark made the rounds between UN assemblies and press conferences, barely seeming to take a moment to breath. In the days following the Infinity War they worked tirelessly to curtail the opportunists and manage the agendas that arose. The Guardians' Quill and Gamora were drafted into serving as pro tempore ambassadors between the Earth and the Nova Empire, while Danver’s allies represented the Kree interests. The surviving Asgardians were granted citizenship on Earth, New Asgard was established on a stretch of land on the shared border of Norway, Sweden and Finland and given City-State status, Thor formally petitioned for membership in the UN and was immediately granted it. At Stark’s urging Dr. Banner came forward with his story, capitalizing on the Hulk’s surge of popularity as the video feeds from the Battle against Thanos showed the green behemoth rising to confront the mad Titan in the Earth's defense time and time again. And Thunderbolt Ross’ star fell. At President’s request he resigned his Cabinet Seat and retired from public life. Amendments to the Sokovia Accords were pushed through to protect the rights of Enhanced on the rising tide of gratitude to Earth’s heroes, in much the same way as the initial body of laws had been ratified using the tragedy of Lagos as a rallying point. Despite the Avengers’ influence and efforts, they were unable to prevent Latveria from being bombed until the entire country was little more than a crater in the ground, scattering the Skrull and enraging Doom past all sanity.

The very existence of the Skrull tore at the bonds of trust. A number of home blood-test kits hit the market and stores couldn’t keep them on the shelves. A slew of murders where the perpetrator claimed that they'd believed their victim to be a Skrull hit court systems across the world. The situation was further complicated when one of the victims, the aid of a Chinese General turned out to be, not a Skrull, but an imposter all the same using Earth-based tech called a Photostatic Veil to flawlessly imitate the face and voice of the unfortunate aid. World-wide there was talk of the need to develop a faster DNA test; Everyone was taking the blood already, would it be that much more an imposition to make sure that people weren’t just human but the human they claimed to be? And if the screenings happened to pick-up DNA the matched to crime scenes shouldn’t the police be given access to that information?

 

* * *

 

 

One night, not long after the Battle against Thanos Scott wandered into the Compound kitchen and found Tony Stark sitting at the breakfast counter staring into the depth of his coffee cup. Scott hesitated in the door for several moments, _‘After everything maybe I shouldn’t bug him. But I’m hungry, he can always tell me to get lost if he feels like it.’_ Scott edged into the room, trying to be non-intrusive. Five minutes later he had a bowl of cereal and Stark still seemed completely unaware of him. The older engineer hadn’t even take a sip of his coffee, or moved, the entire time Scott had been there.

Mantis came in and laid a hand on Stark’s shoulder. He jerked and blinked as if he’d been sleeping with his eyes open. “You shouldn’t,” he said. “The inside if my head is no place for a kid.”

Mantis offered him her sincere but unnatural looking smile and a shrug. “Why not?”

“‘Cause it’s an ugly, traumatizing mess in there, ask anyone,” Stark replied. He took a drink of his coffee to make it look casual when he moved away from her then grimaced at the taste of the long-gone-cold liquid.

Mantis shook her head. “You feel- very much. Too much. I can- gentle it- give you space to think clearly. I don’t mind, I like to help.”

“You shouldn’t have to deal with my shit,” Stark argued reflexively.

“You should sleep now, while my powers hold sway,” Mantis said, ignoring Tony’s protests as she steered him toward his rooms. “My powers are not so great. Only a temporary relief. Only a patch for too much feeling. Clear thinking, to make sense, is the real cure. But sleep will help and if I can assist, even a little, I am happy.”

“You’re a big help,” Scott heard Stark murmur as Mantis urged him to bed. “I get in these damn cycles, ‘Why didn’t you do more?’/’How could you do something so stupid?’ and I can’t get out of it, just round and round. ‘Why didn’t I?’ / ‘Why did I?’ Whatever you do, it kills the drain-circling. It’s a big help.”

_‘If I had a hat, I’d tip it to her,’_ Scott thought as the pair disappeared. _‘He’d have fought to bitter end if she told him he needed help but she suggests her efforts weren’t worth much and suddenly all he’s thinking about is assuring her that she did good and not even realizing that he let her help him... Who’d of thought Stark’d be the type who needed to be tricked into thinking he was helping someone else to get him to take a helping hand?’_

 

* * *

 

 

Scott was arrested the next day.

“The case against you was largely circumstantial until Romanov woke up last night and promptly gave you up,” Everett Ross informed Scott as he was handcuffed and escorted into the hall outside his room. Once he was out, several CSI’s entered to search his rooms and to document Hank’s recovery of all the Ant-Man tech that had been in Scott’s possession.

“Natasha’s awake?” Scott exclaimed, quickly followed by, “She did what?”

Ross smiled nastily, “The preliminary investigation after Ms. Potts informed us of the security breach raised questions; We didn’t believe that Romanov had the technical skills necessary to subvert Stark’s systems. You were the obvious choice for an accomplice but there wasn’t any proof, until Romanov woke up. Once we made her position clear she became exceedingly cooperative, even supplied us with a copy of the virus you used against Stark’s AI, experts have confirmed it’s a match for your work on the VistaCorp job. Loyalty is NOT that woman’s middle name.”

Even though Scott hadn’t resisted, even though he’d surrendered his gear, Knight and Jones continued to provide escort. As they entered the Compound lobby, Scott tried to be grateful that there wasn’t a pack of reporters waiting outside of the door to plaster his arrest across the evening news. Business in the Lobby continued as normal, most of the Agents didn’t even stare as Scott was led out in handcuffs.

Then, suddenly, Stark sprinted across the room to one of the entry locks. The visitor waiting to have his humanity confirmed was an unassuming, bald, bespectacled man. The guard stationed at the door frowned at Stark, “He could be a Skrull,” he said then looked awkward and uncertain as who he’d just reprimanded sank in.

“He’s not,” Stark argued edging toward the door-button. “Why would they? How would they know?”  Only- As soon as the man made it past the checkpoint Stark suddenly seemed to turn shy. _‘Stark shy, that should totally be an oxymoron.’_ Scott thought as his escort paused to gawk at the developing spectacle.

“Stark,” the man greeted him with real warmth in his voice.

“Yinsen,” Stark replied. “Why aren’t you with your family?” Then a look of near panic crossed the billionaire’s face. “They did come back, right? I didn’t screw that up did I?”

Yinsen shook his head, “My family, including a few, quite distant, relatives are all waiting for me.”

Stark scratched at the back of his head, “Er- yeah, about that...”

“It seems that historic resurrections were limited to those who called Gulmira their home and, thankfully, we have always been more a village than a major population center,” Yinsen said mildly. “It is- frankly a mess but not an unsolvable one- There have been three nervous breakdowns and several fist fights between the anthropologists who descended on us from across the globe but we are getting them under control.”

Stark blinked at him for a moment then a faint smile tugged at his mouth. “That bad?”

“They mean well.” Yinsen shrugged, “It is an unprecedented situation but solutions are being found. A few communes are to be established in isolated areas, I believe Montana has been discussed as one possible site, for those who died long ago. The anthropologists quarrel over how we should break the Returnees up but that is details. It is roughly a thousand individuals and we believe it should be possible to establish groups of several dozen each who have enough in common to coexist with each other, in a sealed environment safe and separate from the world at large. Psychiatrists have also come, it is hoped that those who died in the last hundred years will be capable of reintegrating into society, with proper assistance.”

“But- Why are you here?” Stark asked. “You’re a doctor, I’m sure they need you. And your family-”

“Will be there waiting when I return, thanks to you,” Yinsen stated. “But you-” He glanced around the lobby, at the steadily increasing number of gawkers, then took Stark by the elbow. “May we speak someplace… Else?”

Stark nodded.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, this was a bear to write. The Defenders’ segment alone got scrapped and redrafted four different times.


	7. Wants

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wanda reflects

There was no pain, only a dull impact and Wanda found herself lying on the concrete, her eyes fixed on a growing pool of scarlet.

She stared into the crimson depths of her blood, unable to turn her eyes away. She saw herself as a child, beloved and happy, in spite of the wars that raged around her family. She was back, trapped in the rumble of her home, huddled next to Pietro as they waited for the Stark bomb to go off and kill them.

_“Didn’t have the stomach for it.”_

 

* * *

 

“Could you tell us a little about what your dreams are?” the woman asked, eyes full of pity, as her photographer took pictures of Pietro and Wanda for a campaign to raise money and awareness for Sokovia’s orphans.

“I would let you know, if I had anything but nightmares when I close my eyes,” Pietro hissed.

Wanda elbowed him before he could say more. She tilted her head down and put on a sad smile. “We would just like to live in peace. To have these dreadful wars end.”

The woman, who had backed away at the simmering anger in Pietro’s eyes, smiled and patted Wanda’s shoulder, “Of course, dear. That’s what we all want.”

 

* * *

 

For a moment a drop of blood hung on the point of the bolt protruding from Wanda’s skull, then it fell. Concentric ripples spread ripples across the surface of the blood.

_“Your heart’s desire.”_

 

* * *

 

“Focus on what you want,” List advised as he strapped Wanda and Pietro onto upright slabs, along with a half dozen other volunteers. A vat of chemicals sat on a pedestal between them, Loki’s scepter suspended over it.

Pietro waited until List was busy checking Wanda’s restraints, then rolled his eyes. “We want to serve HYDRA,” he mouthed. “Baron von Strucker will make Sokovia stable and strong again.” Most of the others voiced similar sentiments.

List made a small tsking noise, “Focus on what you want, what you truly want, what drives you heart and soul. My success depends on it.”

Wanda gave her twin a disapproving look. “HYDRA is the great enemy of the Avenger, Captain America,” she murmured under her breath. “The Avengers, who shelter the murderer Stark. We will aid HYDRA to destroy the Avengers and HYDRA will grant us our revenge.”

List finished his preparations then left them in that room. From behind a four inch thick, vibranium laced, transparasteel wall he lowered the scepter into the vat then fired a powerful laser into the roiling solution. Rays of energy emanated from the vat, filling the room with the scepter’s power.

The volunteers screamed. Wanda’s voice rose above the din, high and full of hate. “Stark, I’ll destroy him! Let me have Stark!” Wanda screamed. A blood red mist exploded from her and in that moment all Pietro wanted, with all his heart and soul, was to get away.

List’s machine shattered, one of the others died then and there, a shard of the glass protruding from his throat. Pietro felt Wanda in his mind. She was his twin, his other half, he tried to relax but he still wanted to escape.

Then it was over. List and his assistants came and took away the bodies.

 

* * *

 

Wanda stared into the blood and remembered the shattered lab washed in the crimson of her newborn powers. She remembered how they put her and Pietro in glass cages like animals on display.

They let Pietro out after a few weeks, once he was more than the urge to run. But they kept her in their cage for months. They shoved people in with little more ceremony than used when they shoved in her dinner tray. The minds they fed her were ugly and fearful, full of their wants with no thought Wanda. So she drowned them in their fears until their racing hearts broke, fell out of cadence and stopped.

She remembered Pietro leaning up against against the glass, begging her to come back and even through their buffers she could feel her twin’s mind. Pietro wanted what she wanted and he loved her more than he feared her. He showed her the way back, reminded her of how to be more than the wild thing that came out of List’s experiment wanting nothing more than to rend every mind she sensed for the ugliness of them.

She remembered Ultron, a creature of lies, of blood and destruction.

_"Is that why you've come? To end the Avengers?” she’d asked._

_“I've come to save the world. But also, yeah.”_

 

* * *

 

“Wanda, Pietro, what do you want?” Steve Rogers asked as the backup jet Maria Hill had scrounged up to fly them back from South Korea reached cruising altitude.

Pietro deferred to Wanda with a flicker of his eyes.

“We want to stop Ultron,” Wanda said forcefully. “He thinks himself a god and he will kill us all in his mad plan to save the planet.”

Steve shook his head, “From what you’ve told me about Ultron’s plan it’s no mystery why you want to stop him but… I understand being powerless, dismissed as worthless. I agreed to be Dr. Erskine’s lab rat five minutes after I met him… Even without the War, if he’d come to me and said that his serum might be able to cure me- Even if the odds had been fifty-fifty cure or kill, I would have taken the chance. No, honestly? I would have taken much worse odds than that on a bad day.” Steve shrugged, “Either way, cure or kill, I wouldn’t have been a useless burden anymore. I want to understand what’s driving you and I think there’s a good chance that I could… If you’d just talk to me.”

A glint of red entered Wanda’s eyes but she was already composing her response in her head, she didn’t need her powers to figure out what this one needed to be convinced. She looked up at Steve with large, doe-like eyes, “Tony Stark, one of his missiles killed our parents. Pietro and I, we were alone. A war-zone is not kind to orphans and there was always another war brewing in Sokovia. We wanted it to stop.” She sighed sadly, “We- we knew that we should not trust Dr. List, that he and von Strucker had bad intentions but so did every other power in Sokovia. The current government, the previous one, the rebels plotting their coups? They were all corrupt. But List offered us power and I thought- It would not be so easily taken from us once we had power of our own. I spent most my life as a mouse clinging to a piece of driftwood caught in a powerful current, Dr. List’s procedure was like finally being given an oar.”

Wanda bit back a smile when she saw Steve’s expression soften as she reflected back his fear of being small and irrelevant. Then she hesitated, a part of her wanted to leave it at what she’d already said: That Tony Stark, like Ultron couldn't tell the difference between saving the world and destroying it. But she feared that her words weren’t enough to convince the Captain to trust her over his own teammate. She dropped her eyes as if from guilt. “We- You have to stop Stark. I- I- when I went into his mind- Stark, he had only a tenuous hold over his fears. I believe, in looking into his mind, that I disrupted that hold. He does not have the ability to put aside his fears as you do, Captain. His fears rule him, he will not listen.”

“We won’t let Ultron win,” Steve promised determinedly.

 

* * *

 

The ripples of blood reached the edge of the pool and turned to bounce back on themselves.

Wanda remembered how it all crashed down on her. She remembered, Sokovia falling, she remembered fleeing the Avengers after the Skrull imposter was revealed and Stark’s star rose.

She remembered Novi Grad raised from the ashes. She remembered sitting in a dirty little hotel room, half a world away as her twin’s picture appeared and the newscasters spoke of a terrorist turning himself in to the United Nation’s JCTC.

_“Laid at your feet.”_

 

* * *

 

Pietro, alive and well but bound hand and foot in thick chains, stared into the camera with a haunted expression. “My sister and I volunteered for HYDRA’s experiments. They offered us power when, all our lives, we’d had none. The first few months we spent being indoctrinated in Baron von Strucker’s brand of HYDRA’s ideology. For our ‘graduation ceremony’ they took us to a room there were a row of people, on their knees, bound. They told us that they were HYDRA’s enemies and handed us a pistol. There was one victim for each of us. My hand jerked when I pulled the trigger, there wasn’t a second bullet. She screamed and screamed until I strangled her.

“Once we’d proved our loyalty they put us through their procedure, using the scepter that housed the Mind Stone. My sister and I gained powers, the other eight candidates died. HYDRA trained us to use our new powers,” Pietro hesitated in his recitation. “They gave us victims to practice on.” Wanda felt a tear trickling down her cheek because Pietro’s powers were purely physical. HYDRA had simply locked him in a room until he could move without smashing into the walls. They gave him eggs to pick up until he could put them down without shattering them from the deceleration. They gave her blocks to develop her telekinesis but for her powers of the mind… Well, HYDRA was never short of enemies for her to practice on.

“Wanda and I fought against the Avengers when they first attacked the HYDRA base near Novi Grad,” Pietro continued. “Wanda was able to get into Tony Stark’s mind, we then allowed him to capture the Scepter, confident in the belief that it would bring about his destruction. We offered our services to Ultron, as he’d promised us the Avenger’s end. We fought the Avengers again just outside of Johannesburg,enabling Ultron to escape with the Vibranium used in the construction of the weapon that destroyed Novi Grad. We helped Ultron to take over a lab in Seoul, where he used the Scepter to control the minds of the scientists there, forcing them to build him a new body. It was when Ultron began the process of transferring to that body that my sister was able to sense his intentions and realized that he would wipe out mankind if left unchecked. We turned on him, joining the Avengers to fight him.”

The screen cut back to the newscaster. “As you just heard, Pietro Maximoff, twin brother of Wanda Maximoff, the Avenger knows as the Scarlet Witch, turned himself into the JCTC today after confessing that both twins were voluntary agents of HYDRA and aiding Ultron in the destruction of Sokovia, as well as having had a hand in the homicidal robot’s creation.

“Pietro Maximoff was killed fighting against Ultron in the Battle of Sokovia but in a bizarre twist of fate the young man who spent years seeking Tony Stark’s death was restored to life along with the city of Novi Grad earlier this week. Maximoff turned himself in, in the company of his parents, also Sokovia Returnees. It was their deaths, due to a misaimed SI missile in 2004, which put the twins on a decade long quest for vengeance that ended with the complete destruction of their home city in 2015. ZCN reporter Griffin Sinclair was able to speak briefly with the elder Maximoffs.”

A small stifled sob of longing, escaped Wanda as she saw her parent appear on the TV screen. Her mother wouldn’t look at the camera but her father’s head was high, his jaw tight with anger. “To return to life to see that my children had become Nazis, I would rather have remained dead,” he stated. “I am disgusted by them. Pietro says he did this thing to avenge our deaths on Stark,” the man practically spat. “Weapons advances may make easier the expression of the evil in men’s hearts but it does not put it there. The strife driving Sokovia’s civil wars had its roots in events centuries before Stark’s birth, to blame him for that war-” The older man shook his head in disgust.

“Would you say anything to your daughter? Who has been missing since discovery of the imposture Captain America?” Sinclair asked.

The elder Maximoff scowled. “There is more to atonement ceasing to sin and finding powerful men to hide behind. If she has any trace of honor she will stop playing the victim and step forward to claim responsibility for her actions.”

Wanda pushed a fist into her mouth to stifle the screams that want to escape her. Her dearest wish: Her brother, her parents restored to life and Tony Stark had corrupted it because they all hate her.

 

* * *

 

The sounds of screams around her were distant, unimportant things. Even her own faltering heart beat couldn’t hold Wanda’s attention. The sound of blood dripping into a puddle echoed like the beating of a gong. Ripples spread, ever widening until they turned back on their source.

_“But you needed something more than a man. That's why you let Stark take the scepter.”_

 

* * *

 

“Wanda, what do you want?” Captain America asked as the Avengers prepared to leave Sokovia.

Wanda turned toward him, a gleam of red in her eyes, “You are not Steve Rogers.”

He smirked, “Does it matter? What do you want out of life Wanda? If I can help you make it happen, does it matter who I am?”

With touch Wanda could insert herself into the thoughts of others, she could dig for what interested her, force it to the forefront of their consciousness. Without touch she could pick up on surface thoughts, it was usually more than enough. ‘Every man reveals himself in time.’ Where she’d seen cataclysmic destruction in Ultron’s mind, in this man’s mind she saw him ruling the planet. ‘Certainly not Steve Rogers,’ she thought. When she’d touched his mind Wanda had seen a desire to do good masking a largely unacknowledged but driving need to be important.

Wanda studied the being in front of her. If it turned out to be a mistake they were alone and she had no doubt that she could handle the imposture Super Soldier. “What do I want?” she sneered. “I want my brother back. I want my PARENTS back. I want my country not to be a hole in the ground. But, as no one can give me that, I will settle for what I always sought: For the whole world to see Stark as the monster my brother and I know him to be.”

The imposter eyed her coolly. “Ultron was well on his way to giving you that.”

“Ultron would have killed us all,” Wanda screeched.

“If you had not sided with his enemies to see his plans unravel, the impact from Sokovia crashing back to Earth would have decimated Europe and North Africa, with a blast radius extending into the Middle East and Russia. Tidal waves would have had catastrophic effects on coastal cities the world wide. It might have even triggered earthquakes and volcanic explosions along adjoining plate boundaries as the force of the impact was distributed it across the earth. It would have raised massive clouds of dust, dimishinging the solar radiation reaching your planet for a decade, possibly two, ushering in a new ice age and world wide famines. But as primitive as your species is, humans still would have adapted and survived. And every last survivor would have cursed Stark’s name, because Ultron would have ensured that they all knew that their new overlord called Stark his father.

“Ultron would have laid your heart’s desire at your feet, but you didn’t have the stomach to for it,” the imposture stated. “I am not so young and naive as Ultron. Place yourself in my hands child and I will teach you to match your appetite to your capacity. Come back with us, live in luxury on Stark’s tab while your simple presence serves to drive a wedge between him and those he would claim as family. And, I promise you, that will only be the start of the vengeance you so long for.”

 

* * *

 

As her eyes filmed over with death Wanda saw that Ultron was not Stark’s reflection but the ugliness in _her_ soul brought to life and set wild on the Earth.


End file.
